There’s HTML and CSS for arranging and styling text, JavaScript for bringing in interactive elements, WordPress as a means of holding it all together, and very possibly Photoshop and Illustrator to create arresting visual elements for the sites you design. One of the most efficient ways of acquiring this body of knowledge is by attending a certificate program.
Certificate programs are extended series of classes that cover most or all of the above topics; each one usually includes a final project that you can use as part of your job-search portfolio. Unlike diploma programs, which include general studies courses, a certificate program cuts both to the chase and to the bone by eliminating any classes that aren’t directly targeted at the professional field in which you want to work. Certificate programs can take anywhere from a month to a year and a half, and upon completing one, you’ll receive a certificate to add to your resume and online profiles as proof of your achievement and readiness to begin working in a new field.
Certification is a different matter. It’s what you get when you pass a certification exam, and, unlike a certificate, is an objective measurement of what you know about a given topic. Certifications are good adjuncts to certificates because they prove that you know what your certificate says you’re supposed to know. To land a job, you’re going to need to demonstrate your newfound abilities in the tools used in web design, and a certificate/certification combination is a great way of doing that.
Northern Virginia Community College: Web Design and Development Certificate
Key Information:Northern Virginia Community College, with six campuses sprinkled across the northern part of the state, offers a one-year web design and development certificate program. The class entails four courses in the first term and three in the second, for a total of ten credits. That makes the by-the-credit tuition round out to $1091 for in-state students and $3929 for those from outside of Virginia. Credit for prior learning of topics covered in the program may be available. The program has no prerequisites other than the ability to use a computer.
In the first term, students’ experience at NOVA involves three-credit courses and a mandatory orientation course for one more credit. The classes required are Web Page Design I, Software Design, and Multimedia Software, thereby covering both the artistic and the technical aspects of web design. In the second term, students take two more three-credit courses, Web Page Design II and Advanced Multimedia Development. They then have the choice of a four-credit technical class, which can be either Client-Side Scripting or Web Scripting Languages. All these are lecture courses, with three hours of weekly lectures for the three-credit classes and four hours for the four-credit elective.
Students are able to choose their own main campus from the six available, although that doesn’t mean that every class you will need for your certificate is available at the campus you choose. NOVA takes an unusual approach to career services, much of which the school has shifted to online. Every campus nonetheless has a human-staffed career services center, with “express” walk-in hours and regular counseling sessions. NOVA also has a highly developed career development process that includes an interactive online career development tool (FOCUS 2), a further online job search tool, and virtual career fairs.
Otis College of Art and Design Extension: UX/UI for Web Design Certificate
Key Information: this certificate program, which touches on both sides of the web design coin (UX, user experience, and UI, user interface), consists of ten courses. They may be completed anywhere from a year to a year and a half. Tuition is $5310, with the novelty that students pay by the individual course rather than in a lump sum for the entire program. The program involves no prerequisites. The University of California at Riverside issues the certificates of completion for the program.
One of the leading art schools in the United States, Otis College of Art and Design has an extension division that administers a select number of certificate programs. One of those is devoted to both UX and UI development, which concentrates on teaching students the artistic aspects of web design as well as giving them the technical knowledge employers expect. Color theory, graphic design, and typography are all covered in the curriculum, as well as portfolio development by way of the proverbial cherry on top. Students in the program learn to use Figma, Mirro, Sketch, and such Adobe programs as Photoshop and InDesign.
Otis College is located in Los Angeles, and makes its classes available both in-person and live online, enabling anyone with a computer and a stable internet connection to follow their courses from anywhere (so that would include doh mi on 14th Street NW; remember to try the banh mi at your lunch break). The school’s courses combine lectures and lab exercises. The latter develop into the portfolio you will show to prospective employers when you enter the job market. Career counseling and assessment are included in the price of tuition, as are advice on internships and a certain amount of professional networking assistance.
Noble Desktop: Web Design Certificate
Key Information:Noble Desktop’s Web Design Certificate program is priced at $4995 and comprises 162 classroom hours of instruction spread over 26 days. The course has a prerequisite: students should be able to use Adobe Photoshop before the class starts. (Noble Desktop offers several classes in Photoshop, should you need to learn the software in preparation for the web design course). A free retake option is included, meaning that you’ll be able to take the whole course a second time within a year of your first trip through the curriculum.
The Noble Desktop program begins with an introduction to Figma as a means of managing a web design project from stem to stern. Students then learn the basics of UI design before proceeding to the troika of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to style text and create dynamic websites. Flexbox, Grid, and Bootstrap are up next so that students will be able to create interactive and fully functional sites. A slight detour ensues: students learn to style emails with HTML before the course proceeds to using WordPress to construct websites that work on desktop computers as well as the all-important mobile devices on which most people view internet sites these days.
An invaluable adjunct to the certificate program is the eight 1-to-1 mentoring sessions students receive. These meetings put students in touch with experienced professionals, who help to prepare them for the metaphoric cold shower that is the job market. Mentors oversee portfolio development and help out with resumes and interviews. Noble Desktop does not have a job placement program; the school prefers to concentrate on providing an optimal learning experience for its students.
That experience is online and highly interactive: students learn by actually doing what they’re being taught, which keeps them alert and engaged as opposed to having to listen to soporific lectures. Online students can also engage the teacher directly and even give permission for the instructor to look at their screens to help cut whatever Gordian knots they’ve managed to tie. All that is like an in-person class; what is radically different from that familiar model is that you can study wherever you like. If you’re not sure where to do that, consider the D.C. libraries, which have wifi, or, for something more adventurous, try the Eritrean coffee house on the corner of Rhode Island Avenue and 11th Street, where you can get an Eritrean spiced tea instead of coffee (Tigrinya word for the day: boon means coffee) to sip while you learn to be a web designer.
General Assembly: UX Design Bootcamp
Key Information: as a field, UX design expands upon web design by delving into the user’s experience (that’s what UX stands for) of a website. It’s a somewhat more technical field than pure design, although it requires no coding ability. The UX designer’s province is the feel of a site or application. One of the most engaging aspects of a UX designer’s work is performing before and after testing with living, breathing human beings. If this sounds like a potentially compelling field, you might consider General Assembly’s UX Design Bootcamp as a way to launch your career in tech. The program takes three months to complete, with classes held daily from Monday to Friday, starting at either 9:00 a.m. Or noon Eastern Time (if you’re on the West Coast, that means you won’t have to start your school day at six o’clock in the morning). The cost of the program is $16,450. Payment plans are available. The only prerequisite is that students must complete several hours of self-paced pre-work prior to the start of the actual class.
The curriculum encompasses such themes as design development, real-world UX functionality, and even a look at UI (user interface) design, the flip side of the Janus-faced UX coin. Students also complete a capstone project that becomes the foundation of their job-search portfolios. The program is online and live, and can thus be taken from anywhere, thanks to the marvels of Zoom. As a bonus, students learn to use Slack as a means of keeping in touch with the instructors and each other.
General Assembly includes extensive career services with its certificate programs. From the outset, students are all assigned career coaches to help them prepare for the job market. That includes personal brand development, mock interviews, and networking opportunities. The school claims that nearly 75% of its graduates find employment within six months of completing their programs.
Career Foundry: UI Design Program
Key Information: UI (user interface) designers are the people responsible for the creation of the parts of websites and applications with which the user comes into contact. Although some coding knowledge is involved in the field, it is nonetheless a branch of web design and calls for no small amount of creative work and fine-tuning of all the elements that go into a site or app. CareerFoundry’s program in UI design is asynchronous, meaning that the teacher is only available on video tutorials that you view, if not at your leisure, then at least at your convenience. You can complete the program in four-and-a-half months if you work at it full-time, although the beauty of a self-paced course is that you set the pace. Working part-time, you should be able to get through the program in about nine months. Students receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course. Tuition is $7900, payment plans are available, and a money-back guarantee is attached to the course. The program has no prerequisites. CareerFoundry offers a complimentary first lesson on its website.
CareerFoundry is an international school based in Berlin. It boasts of mentors and tutors in every single time zone; despite that scope, all its classes are in English. The UI program is an online on-demand class, but with more human contact than is usual: you view the lessons (CareerFoundry strives to keep them up-to-date) when you can, do the homework when you can, and then submit it to your tutor, who returns it with corrections within 24 hours. As well as having a tutor to help with classwork, you also have a mentor whose duties involve feedback on larger-scale assignments and fine-tuning your portfolio. In addition to this CareerFoundry “dual mentorship” program, you’ll also have a student advisor to help with procedural matters and a career specialist to assist with job-search matters. (To that end, a Job Prep Course is included in the package of classes for students to complete).
The curriculum is subdivided into three unequal portions: introduction, immersion, and specialization. The immersion phase is by far the longest, and consists of five “achievements”: design principles, UX design process, UI design process, mobile app design, and, finally, animation and branding. The specialization phase that follows as a kind of dessert gives students a choice between further work on animation, front-end development for designers, and voice user interface design. The emphasis throughout the project-based curriculum is systematically on endowing students with marketable and in-demand skills.
FAQ for Web Design Certificates
What is the Difference Between a Certificate and a Certification?
Schools bestow certificates upon students who have completed a certificate program. That may sound tautological, but the essential point is that the entity that issues the certificate is a school. A certificate is exactly like a diploma, except that the word “diploma” is generally reserved for degree-granting programs. Some institutions, most especially community colleges, have degree programs and certificate programs, often in the same discipline. When that happens, the diploma program usually takes longer and involves required general studies classes. The certificate programs include only the specialization classes, and, thus, are briefer and more efficient for people seeking to make new careers for themselves.
A certification is a different matter entirely. You obtain one of those by passing an exam set up by either a software manufacturer or a widely-recognized professional organization, and generally administered by an impartial third party such as Certiport. Adobe, for example, provides Adobe Certified Professional certification for people who have acquired a certain level of expertise in one or more of their Creative Cloud programs. The resulting principal distinction between a certification and a certificate is that the certification offers an objective standard by which to judge your abilities.
Should I Pursue a Certificate or a Certification?
Given the differences between certificate and certification, the pitfall of the former should be obvious: a certificate is only as good as the school that issues it. All certificate programs are not created equal, nor are all schools equal, nor, therefore, are the certificates they issue. For practical purposes—the point of view of the hiring director, in other words—certificates from the Fly By Nite Tech School and Taco Truck aren’t going to carry much weight, although those from widely recognized, licensed, or accredited schools will. Not all hiring directors are created equal, however, and not all of them know as much about certificate-issuing tech schools as they probably should. Thus it’s possible that with a certificate alone you won’t get recognized for your complete set of accomplishments.
This is where the certification can come in handy. Unlike a certificate, which not all hiring managers may interpret the same way, a certification is an unequivocal indicator of what you know and what you can do. There’s no arguing with a certification: it means exactly what it means, and the people responsible for hiring know that. In a more perfect world, you’d be able to sit for a web design examination that would test and confirm the full range of your abilities in your new field. Unfortunately, nothing like that exists (the more comprehensive web design certifications require several years of work experience before you can qualify for them). You can, however, stand for certifications in such things as the Adobe Creative Cloud programs, which will fully demonstrate at least some of your capabilities.
Do I Need to Become Certified to Find a Job?
Certificates are subjective, certifications are objective—and the hiring process is the most subjective of all. It is generally conducted by one person who infamously spends six to seven seconds looking at each resume that makes it past the Application Tracking System (ATS) that has no other purpose than to weed out applications that it thinks aren’t worth the hiring director’s time. Applying for jobs today has become a crap shoot, and there simply is no way to predict how a given hiring director is going to react to that cursory glance at your resume.
You can’t control the hiring process, but you can control to the best of your ability what you put into it, that being your resume and cover letter. There is no guarantee that certification will get you hired. The hiring director may not even notice that you’re certified in something when they give your resume the six or seven seconds’ attention they allot you. Regardless of that, you can be sure that having a certification badge on your resume and LinkedIn profile isn’t going to hurt your chances of landing a job. You have nothing to lose besides the fee for the exam.
Just don’t expect the certification to be a magic lozenge that will get you hired for the first job for which you apply, although stranger things have happened..
What Certificate Program is Right for Me?
Which is Better: In-Person or Online Classes?
The answer here is: it depends on two factors.
Factor one is your own personal preference for how to learn. You may like a traditional classroom setting because it’s familiar and because you do well with the structure you get from being in the same room as the teacher. Learning online is different, and may require a leap of faith, especially for non-traditional students who don’t necessarily trust the internet as much as people who grew up with it do. It, nonetheless, is an effective pedagogical modality, and literally millions of students have benefitted from it. And it has much to recommend it, not least of all the convenience of not having to drag yourself to a brick-and-mortar school. You can study anywhere you want, be it at home in D.C. or on the beach in Washington in French Polynesia. You may need some time to adjust to a new way of working, a new way of getting the teacher’s attention when you have a question, and a new way of relating to your classmates, but fear not, it can and has been done literally millions of times.
Factor two is the reality that most tech schools are shifting to teaching exclusively online and that live in-person classes are getting as scarce as hen’s teeth. That’s hardly an exaggeration in the case of Washington, D.C., where your search for a live web design certificate program is going to turn up next to nothing. You may thus have to take an online class because there are no other options available. Rather than let that scare you off, don’t forget that you’re not a third grader in the thick of the COVID pandemic being forced to study in front of a computer screen when you can’t sit still, but, rather, a grown-up who is learning because you want to get a better job. You can benefit immensely from an online course, as so many have before you.
Which is Better: Live Online or Asynchronous Classes?
Although there are more advantages to a live online (synchronous) class than to an on-demand (asynchronous) class, each has something to recommend it. Live online means that you have a live teacher at your disposal to answer questions, help you through problem areas, and generally keep an eye on your progress. You’ll also have fellow students with whom you can communicate and share the learning experience. Finally, a live class ensures that you’ll be working with the latest software versions, as it’s far easier to update a live teacher than a whole sequence of video tutorials. You won’t find these features in an on-demand course.
That’s not to say that an asynchronous class won’t work for you. Indeed, people who like to learn on their own (formerly known as book learners) will no doubt find that teaching themselves to become web developers is a more enjoyable (and profitable) means of learning web design. The other major factor to recommend self-paced learning is the convenience of being able to study, not only wherever you want, but also whenever you want. People who can’t devote themselves to a full-time daytime program (which is what most of the web design certificate programs are) will likely have little choice but to commit to an on-demand program if they’re to acquire the skills they need
To guarantee maximum success from a self-paced program, you should first ensure that the video lessons are of recent vintage. Aging may be good for wine, but it’s fatal to tech education, where software is constantly changing. You should also make your study time a regular part of your day and stick to the schedule you set. Probably the biggest hazard of an online class is losing momentum and maybe not even finishing the course because you’ve lost interest and don’t have anyone to nudge you to keep working. This can be overcome with some determination and discipline, so make sure you’re well provided with those qualities before you invest in a self-paced course.