Hello everyone, i just have a series of questions regarding what education path is better for employment and pay for designers/developers. I have been studying html/css/javascript  on my own  the past 4 months, but will most likely head back to school next year and complete a degree.   

The questions I have are:

1. Is it ok to just have an associates degree(in web design and development), or will it be better to have a bachelors in order to improve my prospects for employment?

2. Will having a bachelors means better pay?

3. Will a online-bachelors degree look just as good as an on-campus bachelors degree to employers?

4. Does a certificate from a training program look just as good as a bachelors degree to employers for getting hired?

Answers to all 4 are: it depends.

In many cases experience counts for far more than qualifications.

I'm not 100% sure mate, I've seen some roles who want a bachelors degree but I could see no reason if you tick all the other boxes. One thing to note if in the UK, what's being taught in the education system is probably out of date and often incorrect as the industry moves quite fast. Prime example my son is doing a GCSE in computer science, part of it covers some web design, they taught the basic html page setup and completely missed out DOCTYPE 😓

15 minutes ago, fisicx said:

Answers to all 4 are: it depends.

In many cases experience counts for far more than qualifications.

Ah, do you mean work experience in the field, or do you mean just how long someone has been dabbling in design/development stuff in general?

You don't need any formal qualifications in web development.  I know people without degrees who are earning well over £100k a year (Even outside of the SE/London).
A degree might help you land your first junior role but definitely is not required.  IMO The time you'd spend doing a degree you could be gaining real world industry experience.  I myself managed to land a role of a senior developer just under 3 years of me starting to learn web dev.  Grads who were joining were earning around half what I was and had a large student debt on top of this.  

So

1. Is it ok to just have an associates degree(in web design and development), or will it be better to have a bachelors in order to improve my prospects for employment?
You don't need either.

2. Will having a bachelors means better pay?
In most cases it won't.  See my paragraph above.

3. Will a online-bachelors degree look just as good as an on-campus bachelors degree to employers?
It depends.  Really when I am evaluating potential hires I don't give much weight to qualifications.  I want to know if the person can code and work well as part of an agile team.  So having a github profile which includes some projects I can see will carry weight.  A strong passion for learning can land somebody with less experience a job too.  Passion to learn is VERY important.

4. Does a certificate from a training program look just as good as a bachelors degree to employers for getting hired?
See #3

Edited October 18, 20188 yr by rbrtsmith

1 hour ago, ejg said:

Ah, do you mean work experience in the field, or do you mean just how long someone has been dabbling in design/development stuff in general?

I mean showing a potential employer what you are capable of.

There are many different roles you can choose, an agency won't expect you to be able to do everything so you need to decide what specialisation you prefer.

1 hour ago, fisicx said:

I mean showing a potential employer what you are capable of.

There are many different roles you can choose, an agency won't expect you to be able to do everything so you need to decide what specialisation you prefer.

I agree with this.  The agency I worked at the roles were split like this:
Designer,
Front-end developer
Back-end developer.

Larger companies divide the roles up even further and many choose to sepecialise as they advance their career.

You'll find roles such as
- DevOps
- Front-end performance engineer
- Systems architect
- Testers
 - Scrum master,
- Product owner
- Business Analyst

For design you get people who specialise in UI design and those who specialise in UX and even user journey designers.

If you want to be both a designer and developer then you will have more to learn - you're increasing the barrier to entry.  That said it's good to have at least a basic understanding of the whole stack or process.

Edited October 18, 20188 yr by rbrtsmith

One place I did a contact for employed one person to just look after accessibility and standards compliance.

2 hours ago, fisicx said:

One place I did a contact for employed one person to just look after accessibility and standards compliance.

Yeah there's a few people here at Sky who specialise in Accessibility.

Hello everyone, just wanted to Thank you all for the responses!

Everything said has been very helpful, i just mainly focus on increasing my understanding and coding pontential of html/css and javascript

Edited October 19, 20188 yr by ejg