Do Internet Skills Matter? After The Gold Rush

How crucial are skills to the internet professional? WOW, hold on! What are we talking about? Is there such a thing and an internet professional ? ? ? This question kind of sneaks up on people. Since the internet profession has evolved and grown so quickly, it seems like experience or "showing up for work" at a successful company is enough to qualify as a professional. That's the nature of fast growing professions. Even in the software industry, where professional skills pioneer like Steve McConnell have been preaching for over a decade, professional qualification, certification and skill assessment is not an industry standard practice. Yet, for the customers, especially the ones starting out with new internet projects (without experience) the qualification and skill level of their employees is crucial. In general, the world of software development and content management, are mysterious and vague. This state of affair has not changed in a long time. As far back as 1974 Brooks' The Mythical Man-Monthdescribed in details the follies IBM in his biggest project to date, the IBM System/360, and how difficult estimation, development, testing and maintenance of large software projects. Much has changed since the early days of software development, yet we are still in an era where it is difficult to manage and therefore describe to outsiders the work of technologists in software. This is even more true today with different aspects of content and application use on the internet.

In software and content development for internet project there are a few basic roles which are well defined today. Projects themselves run such a wide range of format, size and business use, defining a single template or method is not practical. Yet, as professionals, we need to work on clearly showing our skills, our experience and most of all our expertise. Some designers, writers, managers, promoters, etc... are better skilled than the average bear. Some projects, well defined and well fitting to the developers are clearly better executed and the rewards are phenomenal. Conversely, there are professionals stuck with inferior results or unsatisfied clients. Some projects, start out with frameworks, tools and even a message which will need changing. Some clients are not familiar with what can be done or are not realistic about results and therefore are never completely "done". This may not be the fault of a writer or designer, yet results do define our image and therefore are crucial to customers.

What we see today in IT certification (from Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle), is a useful example to use in professional internet sector. The technical side of developing and operating large systems, weather they are a corporate network (Cisco) or a large web site (Linux/Apache /WordPress), testing for skills in configuration and operation of these systems is a similar task to operating a web site, blog and even a social media group on Facebook or Linked-In. As far as content creation, editing and management, here there are different set of skills criteria. Some of the sites which coordinate contractor work like oDesk, perform entry level skill tests for technical writers. For now, we have an opportunity to create a set of tests, portfolio examples (i.e. templates) and customer review standards that will stand instead of certification. As internet professions mature, as the market standardizes on certain type of deliverable projects, the conditions will give us more standardized tests, portfolio examples and reference templates. Just like more established professions, customers will be able to see what we have done and how we became proficient craftsmen and craftswomen. The next step is how to differentiate on basis of creativity, results and maybe even speed and output. Stay tuned, there are good examples there too.