Professional Accreditation for Web Professionals (Or, a rant on the British Computer Society)
Sam Phillips, July 6th, 2008 10:20 pm
I have been very focused recently on my personal development, and carving a career path out of a selection of broadly-defined roles. In addition, I am keen to increase the amount of professional training I receive, so that, frankly, I get better at my job.
Where does a web professional turn for this? I have yet to find out. Have I missed something?
Is the best option the British Computer Society, whose first selling point on all of their selling materials (with which they will barrage you once you register an interest) is the letters you get after your name? Apparently I could stick ‘AMBCS’ after my existing letters for just a nominal fee (and other puns as well). What, exactly, would this prove? Nothing. But hey, I’ll admit flirting with the idea, though, so I delved deeper into the benefits.
So firstly, I’ve got the letters. I already have 8 (and opening and closing parenthesis, let’s not forget), so another 5 would be a nice addition. John has more letters after his name than in his name. That’s surely something to aspire to.
In addition, membership would, of course, mean that I could join your Internet Specialist Group, and peruse thrilling materials, such as the Chairman’s 10 favourite websites. These include Yahoo, multimap and the BBC news site. But let’s be fair. The site hasn’t been updated in 3 years.
That’s right. The British Computer Society’s Internet Specialist Group website hasn’t been updated in three years. I suppose that’s fair enough. It’s been a fairly quiet time.
Oh and another great feature of the BCS’s ISG site – it doesn’t validate. I’d forgive this; not a lot of stuff does, but the image that fails validation is the very same image that proclaims the code to be valid XHTML. That’s right. They’ve taken the code that the w3c gave them and rendered it invalid. Nice work.
The other benefits of membership are even more attractive. Of course, I have the weekly e-newsletter. One can only imagine the delights that it holds. Also, 50% discounts on Microsoft products. Thanks, but I’ll stick with my 100% discount on open source software.
Oh, and networking. Because I want to spend my time discussing escalation matrices with IT chumps. No thanks. I’ll keep my £50 and spend it on beer.
