Wouldn’t it be wiser to learn about business processes/e-commerce methods & technology with the ultimate goal of becoming an e-tailer? I wouldn’t be excluded from the jobs market (like cows) given that in fact the future of the web is e-commerce in all of its variations?

I think I am using this forum to argue with myself – sorry.

Thanks

Thanks for allowing me to read all of the above insights and for allowing me to post my thoughts.

I am at a cross roads myself and luckily I can spend all day/every day to work on a plan of action for my own skills development.

IMO, I find working (front-end/design since 2003), as an employee very degrading – mainly because most of the companies/organisations I’ve worked for have not been at the cutting edge of web technology – i.e. website only, nothing ‘innovative’. I have always felt held-back and under-performing, and worse still, working with people who were happy with their admin jobs. I have nothing against that, but peer competition and skills sharing is vital is learning, whereas the cost of paperclips is not really useful knowledge. Neither is using Word a ‘skill’ – IMO! This makes me dream of working for Google, or Facebook, etc because I perceive that these companies are in fact on the cutting edge of web technologies, and they are. Of course, this is my generalisation. Allow me.

For quite a while I’ve wanted to go setup my own business, e-commerce store, SAAS – in fact so many ideas. But the truth of it is I don’t posses all of the required knowledge need in order to be able to react and develop – I have to do the learning first. But, I believe that the best way to learn is to work on real projects rather than hypothetical/educational projects. You see, I don’t want to learn out of love for web development, I want to learn because it will give me the freedom needed to develop the next angry birds, or app, or SAAS platform whether for prototyping for deployment. Basically I do not posses these skills because I have learnt what I know within the confines of my limitations – i.e. employment, everything I know is based on what my employer requires of me. This is not good and it requires me to invest all of my time up-skill myself.

My cross roads currently: learn web/app development on quasi-real self-set projects, or concentrate on business/e-commerce process whilst being able to use my current skills set. My ultimate goal: to become self-reliant, self-employed, responsible for generating my own income.

So what the answer? Well, it seems to be that I should focus on becoming a self-employed e-tailer and remain in my current web design job until I’m safe to break free and continue. It seems counter productive to me that I should learn web development skills just in order to furnish my own CV and career when it fact I’d prefer to work for myself.

I was recently able to find a job for one of the students in a class I teach at a local school. They were looking for someone to work in an .asp environment and he had no background in that language, but I recommended him anyways because I knew he was a great, responsible kid who was a fast learner and could learn quickly.

So, they hired him first as a contractor and after a month or so, brought him in full time. He proved he was a great coder and a great person and that was more important than knowing a specific language.

I hear you on the content on the site. It’s something we’re striving to improve upon. Before I became an author for Lynda, I was an avid subscriber of the site and I know about your frustration. because I sometimes felt the same way.

We try to add different kinds of courses to the library…Foundational Courses like James Allardice’s series on programming, then application or language specific courses like our Adobe Series and then project based courses on accomplishing specific tasks, which is more like what you’re referring to.

We have a really good team of people on the content site and are working on a combination of the above mix. The series that I created View Source is designed to focus on solution based projects, but their focus is 10 minute projects, so I can’t always cover bigger projects.

I really love the example page and your idea. I will pass this along to my boss so he can evaluate it for a possible course. I really like those type of goal focused projects…it’s one of the things I hope to do more of in the future. I know the reason why it doesn’t happen as often is because of the massive quantity of content we have to cover.

Thanks for your input.

Thank you so much for your words on this subject. As in physical training it is important to keep your core strengthened so you have the foundation to specialize and train where each project leads you.

However, most of the courses on lynda.com are focused on learning a particular language and not on choosing and using languages to solve a particular business problem.

Most of my customers will send a link to a competitor’s site and say “I would like my customers to be able to do the same thing on our site”.

The latest link is http://www.bibendum-wine.co.uk/wine/search

Great looking site and functionality that I know a lot of customers would like, but this kind of real world useful knowledge is not on the lynda.com site.

I am a premium member who is thinking of cancelling or downgrading my subscription next year because the site seems to be focused on ‘beginners’ and there are not enough ‘real world problem solving courses’ for web development.

All of your subscribers will go beyond the beginner category after a short period of time and then leave when there is nothing else left for them to learn on the site.

It’s much less expensive to keep an existing customer than to gain a new one.

I have asked for a course on search filtering like on the http://www.bibendum-wine.co.uk/wine/search page but nothing is available on the site.

I hope this changes