My new job…

I have been going to school now at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (Online) for almost three years. I expect to finish classes in February of 2010 and begin life as a college graduate. If you don’t know me, I am 41 years old and have been attempting to get a college degree for over 20 years now but life has gotten in the way of my success up till now.

I live in a small town and there are not many opportunities to get local web development jobs so I have kind of resolved to putting out my freelance shingle and trying to market myself online as much as possible. Last month, a friend of mine gave me an opportunity to work part time for the City of Moscow, Idaho as a web developer. I jumped at the chance.

The job really requires a lot of people skills so I spent the first couple of weeks trying to figure out how to do that. Again, for the last three years, I have been going to school online and my people skills have certainly not been tested much in this last third of a decade. For the record, I have always thought I had pretty good people skills but I think they got a little rusty during my online education.

One of the things that kind of tripped me up was having to figure out a good pace for the job. I had been greeted with a pile of backlogged tasks and I immediately began making those updates. Much of this was just cutting and pasting content but there were some needs for the creation of new pages. Currently the site does not have a CMS and there is a lot of legacy code so there are a lot of room for errors to be made if the necessary attention to detail is missing. This backlog was in addition to the primary task of updating the current site’s design (someone else’s, I am just implementing it with more modern code) so I was a little distracted.

People get a little angry with you when you screw up their web pages.

This brings me to the next point, there are just about 150 employees of the City of Moscow and each of them carries just as much importance as the other (although there are a few of them who carry a little more importance because of their position). I now cannot just easily calculate the necessary time to complete a task because I often have 150 different schedules to work around and the occasional side task that needs to be completed simply because of its time sensitive nature.

Overall, I think my education prepared me pretty well for this job. I really enjoy it and I come home tired but satisfied because I can quantify what I did during the day and over time. I am really grateful for the chance to gain some actual work experience and I am eager to see what the future holds for me at the City of Moscow. Frankly though, I believe a strictly online education was not able to prepare me for actually working with clients. I am glad that I had life experiences to fall back on in order to ground myself. For current and future students in online only programs, I have a little advice. Get out of the house every once in a while and talk to real people. Volunteer for your favorite charity. Get a part time job as a delivery person. Do any thing to get yourself some experience dealing with other people and their needs. People skills are unspoken requirements for just about any job and they are hard to quantify but you will most certainly regret not having them when you graduate and begin looking for work.

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