We're regularly asked to explain why qualifications from colleges and universities are being replaced by more commercial certifications? As demand increases for knowledge about more and more complex technology, the IT sector has been required to move to the specialised core-skills learning that can only come from the vendors - that is companies such as Microsoft, CISCO, Adobe and CompTIA. This usually turns out to involve less time and financial outlay. The training is effectively done through concentrating on the particular skills that are needed (together with a proportionate degree of background knowledge,) rather than covering masses of the background 'extras' that degree courses often do (to fill up a syllabus or course).

Put yourself in the employer's position - and your company needed a person with some very particular skills. What's the simplest way to find the right person: Go through reams of different degrees and college qualifications from graduate applicants, trying to establish what they know and what trade skills have been attained, or pick out specific commercial accreditations that exactly fulfil your criteria, and then choose your interviewees based around that. Your interviews are then about personal suitability - instead of long discussions on technical suitability.

Workshops can be offered as a big positive benefit by some trainers. When you talk to most IT students who've attended a few, you'll likely realise that they've now become a major problem mainly due to the following:

- Repeated travelling - quite a distance away in more cases than not.

- Taking constant holidays or time off - typical training providers provide Mon-Fri class availability and often group days together in a clump. This is generally difficult for those of us who work for a living, and it's made more problematic when travel time is included.

- At only four weeks vacation allowance, sacrificing half of them for training days leaves very little time for holidays.

- Because of the cost involved, many trainers really push the size of the class - which isn't ideal (and far less personal).

- The pace of the class - centre-days can consist of students of mixed talent, therefore tension develops between students with more background knowledge and those who prefer a more relaxed pace.

- Never overlook the increased expense of travelling and bed and breakfast for the night either. Don't be surprised to find this become a lot of money - from hundreds to thousands. Sit down and add it up - you may be surprised.

- Do you want to risk any chance of being passed-over for potential advancement or pay-rises just because you're retraining.

- Many of us find that, at times, it's uncomfortable to raise questions in a room full of our fellow students - so we don't appear ignorant.

- Being away from home with your work during the week - some attendees find themselves working or living somewhere else for part of the program. Classes are therefore hard to get to, unfortunately the monies have already been handed over when you paid initially.

The most impressive solution rests with watching a filmed class - having instructor-led teaching on hand whenever you wish. Whenever you experience difficulties, get onto the live 24x7 support (that you should have insisted on for any technical study.) Keep in mind, if you've got a laptop, you can study just about anywhere. Just do the learning modules whenever you need to. And of course, you won't need to jot down any notes as you have the lesson indefinitely. Put simply: You save time, hassle, money and completely avoid polluting our environment.

The 'Adobe Creative Suite' is the most commercially-popular design environment utilised by web designers these days. These essential applications are now (2010) on Version 4. The software that builds web-sites is Adobe Dreamweaver, and 'Adobe Flash' gives access to 'graphical' content that can be animated & interactive. You could actually say that Dreamweaver is the Word-Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite series. Within particular rules and constraints, it allows you to display text & graphics, & then through a process known as page-linking you can generate basic inter-activity inside the web-site. HTML ('Hyper Text Markup Language') program coding is developed behind the scenes with Dreamweaver, just like any other web design environment. 'HTML' is a script which essentially draws & controls the page displayed on your screen. Its the 'language' of web browsers. Paired with 'HTML' are the lay-out tag 'languages' like CSS and XML. As these 'tag' 'languages' are 'standardised', the streamlined and rather more efficient results perform effectively on a number of different platforms. The idea is that the page will appear exactly the same on any browser, be it Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, 'Safari', Opera or anything else. So even though you place the graphic-blocks and put in the textual content, Dreamweaver is converting this into coding behind the scenes. A comprehensive knowledge of these types of 'languages' is very important if you are going to be a commercially viable web-designer.

Extra skillsets that are very useful to professional web-site designers are an understanding of project-management and e-commerce. Another field - which isn't to be under-estimated - is 'SEO' ('Search Engine Optimisation'). This is focused on how to optimize website indexation on search engines like 'Google' & 'Yahoo'. And whilst they technically come from a network administration background, we should remember the incredibly valuable job of the web server installers and administrators, who keep the whole thing working behind the scenes.

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