I think we’ve all seen a film where the heroes are trapped in some room and the walls are closing in, threatening to crush them, or the room’s defenses are activated and lasers are shooting at them while they’re pinned down in cover, or desperately trying to dodge the blasts. What do the heroes do? Well, they call out to the “techie” person of the group, who’s usually in another room, watching from a monitor, and scream at him or her (usually him) for help. And this person goes to work on a keyboard and we see a window open up on screen with code on it, and they do some quick (non-nonsensical) typing, and the room’s traps/defenses either shut down or turn on the bad guys and take them out. No, I’m not trying to sell you my screenplay, I want to bring this up because when we see this, we think to ourselves, ‘That’s badass! To just hit a few keys on a computer and Boom! I just saved the day. I wanna do that…’ But then our brain automatically switches to thoughts of mountainous, thick textbooks with titles like, ‘Super nerd calculus-programming’, or ‘Say goodbye to your social life, nerd! Volume II’. And we think that we could never be this studious person, this soul of near-cosmic understanding of numbers, formulae, and ‘the maths’. We can’t see ourselves as this hero…
Well, we’re here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. “Coding is not that difficult to learn. Why then is there this major misconception about how difficult coding is?” The reason may not surprise you, if you’re a parent putting their kid through high school, or a kid in high school who’s hating physics or chemistry right now: teachers. “Most of the code courses out there are put out…[by] people who have no business trying to put out courses on code, because they simply do not know how to teach. …I would say if you tried to learn to code and you weren’t able to do it; you found it too difficult, too hard, I’d say there’s a 95% chance that it’s not you, it’s the bloody course.”
Now, we’re not saying this applies to all courses, and FULL TRANSPARENCY: We do offer coding courses, but this isn’t about that. You don’t have to buy our stuff, we’re not pushing that on you (there will be links down below, but there always were -nothing has changed there). The real reason is, “it leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth…because they’re not getting trained properly [and], they’re throwing you off of something that you could actually do.”
Check out the VLOG for a way more in depth dive into the subject, including the difference between courses and tutorials (which is what a majority of the all the so-called courses you get sold are), and on a lighter note, find out how good Stef was at grade 10 math (hint: not very). If January is already getting you down, check out the awesome beach and boats scenery towards the end of the VLOG, and if you have or know someone who you think is a great teacher, take 5 minutes and let them know you appreciate their efforts, it’s nice to hear.
Should you get a college degree or learn online to quickly get into freelance web design and development?
If you feel like you’ve already read about this in a previous article or saw it in a previous VLOG, yes and no. That previous work was about education in North America, “where student loan debt is an issue, where college is not free…”, and this one is about education in places like Europe, which are a little different because, “in Europe college is free…well it’s paid [for] by the taxes, so in essence you’re paying for it whether or not you go, because it’s built into the taxes.” In all honesty, we brought this up because we were contacted by someone in Europe who’s thinking of going to school to get their degree but was wondering about completing online courses and going into freelancing instead.
Now, we made a lot of assumptions on this person’s part: we assumed they were pretty young because they mentioned that their parents wanted them to go to college, which made us further assume they were probably living at home too, so while the advice we’re about to give may seem oddly specific, we still feel most of it can apply if you’re living in Europe or a place that has a similar educational setup. “If you live in a part of the world where the education is free, you’re living at home so you don’t need to make money immediately, and you’re going to pay for it in taxes anyway, right? The government pays, so it means you pay in some form …it’s only a year and a half/ two years, then you know, might as well do it.”
Now there are way more angles to this and the VLOG, of course, goes into more detail and is worth checking out but we want to let you know about a really cool offer by clicking here. We’ve teamed up with InMotion hosting for a really amazing offer where they essentially pay for you to take my course and learn how to become a web developer. Links to the offer below as well. -Enjoy!
With more and more people accruing astronomical student loan debt, many wonder is education really better than real world experience.
Full transparency:. 1. This is mostly an American/North America problem. 2. Not all higher learning institutions are created equal. 3. We are talking mostly about software engineers. 4. There will be shameless plugs to our online courses.
If you’ve been a young adult on this planet in the last 120 years, you’ve heard the sales pitch: Go to school, get a degree/diploma, get a really good job, make money, get married, buy a house, settle down and pump out 2.5 kids and get a dog…maybe a cat. And we’ve all accepted and railed against this pitch to varying degrees. But more and more (and this is especially prevalent in the US and Canada), graduates are leaving colleges and universities with astronomical student debts and <almost> worthless degrees. Which in turn begs the question; ‘What did I do with the last 3-5 years of my life if I can’t get a job in my field of study?’
Now I feel I need to say that this is not always the case for everyone. And there are fields like medicine where higher learning and degrees are expected and can be worthwhile, but let’s talk about software engineers…and maybe people with philosophy degrees…sorry, artistic types.
I’ll get to the point quickly because if you’ve just graduated a 3 year program at $30K/year you either don’t have time to read all of this at your 9-5 entry level job you had to take to pay back your almost $100K student debt or you really should stop reading this and go back to looking for a job to pay it off… But that’s the problem isn’t it? You have this crazy debt and no guarantee of a job in your field, while someone who hasn’t gone to college or university, and has taken a well put together online course…like STUDIO WEB ( sorry, that was shameless), has completed the course in way less time than you, has had time to garner real world experience and is now just as qualified, if not more so, to work in your field.
This has a lot of people wondering is a higher learning degree worth it? Look, I know it’s hard for colleges and universities, they have a lot of staff to pay; academic and administrative. They have curriculum that take long to approve, which almost always guarantees that the knowledge being passed down to you is dated or even irrelevant. While courses being offered online for less than half the price of admission, or even just going in with no education but ability to jump in and get your hands dirty has gotten others to better positions in the field in (sometimes) way less time.
Check out the VLOG for an almost surgical analysis of this subject. Heads up, it’s a meaty one. But there are article quotes read and then in depth experiences that are shared. We’re not saying to not get your education or to drop out if your already…institutionalized? All we’re saying is to weigh your options, look at the market (in your field), and think of what is really important in that field; most times while education is an important foundation, real world experience wins out almost every time. And if you can take our awesome STUDIO WEB courses, and our freelance courses (<links at the bottom>/ Shameless promo #2, sorrynotsorry…) and get that foundation in months, that would leave you way more time to accrue that oh-so-sought after real world experience…
