MikePadgett.com

A dearth of Internet training

— Your boss tells you to find some training for your personal development programme. What happens when you can't find any?…”

Source: Wikimedia Commons

As a web design professional, I have to put up with a number of disappointments. Internet Explorer 6, Adobe ‘mergers’ etc.

Actually, if you will tolerate a brief digression, I don’t usually get into all that Microsoft bashing business (though I do read Linux Format magazine whenever J buys it). But I was just now on MS eOpen, fishing around in that last-updated-in-the-Middle-Ages Sargasso Sea of a site, for how to get serials for Windows XP Pro 64-bit.

I mean, these people want you to license your product legally. So you part with your hard earned shekels but then, even then, it’s not easy, is it? Oh, no.You have to go half way around Microsoft world to get to your bloody serial number. Tim Berners-Lee or whoever must have been having a right old laugh when they called it hyperlinking.

Digression over. My main point was supposed to be about the dearth (a suitably Yorkshire word) of suitable training for web professionals. I remember the drowsy paranoia that every (wo)man and his/her dog was taking up FrontPage as a hobby (who’d be a Support Analyst?).

And that if we weren’t going to be out of a job, we’d certainly get the full-frontal eyesore of lemon and lime colourschemed intranet pages with Comic Satan copy telling you all about the latest private healthcare benefits on offer from HR. Yeah, like start off by giving us all a free eye test…

So I look around. They want me to do training, you see. I haven’t studied anything since my degree. The memories of those queasy mornings of silent desperation and a throat sore from 40 Bensons (that was my definition of cramming) still march like Crimean soldiers in the mind of a feverish Napoleon.

So I look and it’s bleak out there. Foundation web design: “in this course you will learn to write simple documents in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) which is the language of the Internet”. HTML is not the language of the Internet. Mediocrity is the language of the Internet and it is a more righteous language for humanity in general, a candidate to replace American English.

I once asked my class back in Korea: “where does English come from?”. They said “America”. Of course it does. Why wouldn’t it? If history could be bottled and sold, the Republicans would be doing it and Blair would be taxing the imports. After all, like other traded commodities, history can be modified and processed for palatable mass consumption. Just ask the Japanese.

“Learn to harness the power of Java Beans”. I mean to say… where do these people get off?

There seems to be nothing in between. It’s either Dumbed-Down Web 101 or Study hard and you too can become C#. I want to better myself, I really do, but sometimes I think maybe Accountants really do have the inside track.

Back in 2001, when it was still fashionable for graduates to debut at KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopersLybrandStoyHayward, I met a bunch of these self-satisified idiots in Stevenage. BTW don’t even ask why I was there in the first place. Because I can’t actually remember. I can’t.

They were all from towns on the edge of redbrick respectability but by no means the brightest bulbs in the box. A goofy lot of overgrown kids, they had all the tact of a Flash intro.

Wasn’t it fun to be away from home, or whatever they called their graduate shared houses (because home is still the parents’ isn’t it)? I could imagine them headed for disaster – pub in the evening, a nice Travelodge, a jolly old time, then wallop, a Junior Associate gets up the duff and her drunken assailant goes bald quickly in a provincial practice, scraping together an existence on probate and small business books whilst aspiring to own a Saab 95.

It’s time the early 2000s had its own This Life. So I would be able to watch the demise of my own youthful generation (we had no dreams we could put our finger on). This Life got boring when it did the bits in the courtroom and chambers. The work bits. I could watch the The Next Life but I don’t have a TV.

Er, yeah, so there’s no courses around that are suitable for me, that was my point…