You may have seen the Internet Webmaster type jobs advertised or maybe you've been sent an email with an irresistible offer along the lines of,
"Become a certified Internet Webmaster and earn 35k a year!"
Sounds great doesn't it but there's a big problem with this type of offer. The offer is generally from a training company who is only interested in one thing only and that is selling their training.
They have no real aspirations of you succeeding by becoming a webmaster, heck, you could become the King of England and they wouldn't bat an eye lid.
All they are interested in, is whether you can afford their training or if that's not the case, whether you're eligible for finance from one of their friends, the banks.
As long as you can somehow pay for their training , they'll be your friend and beyond this is where any empathy they have for their students ends.
Actually, they don't really want to be your friend anyway, unless of course through a freak of nature, you achieve actually become a webmaster. Then they'll want you, so they can use you, by parading you as a success story for their so brilliant training.
The rogue training companies will spin lies around the value of certification and how it will make employers want you. The truth is a lot different from the spin these training companies will give you, as very few employers care too much about certification and they care even less about someone who has no actual IT experience but has a certification.
Let's say you did take the plunge and forked out a few thousand for the webmaster training on offer from these cowboys.
Let's also say you successfully attained the certification as well and you could call yourself a certified webmaster. Your problems will suddenly start when you have to compete with all the experienced webmasters, who are also looking for a job.
These webmasters will have years of experience and will know various web technologies on various web platforms. They necessarily won't have a certification as there's no need for them to validate their already extensive experience.
Those that do have a certification will probably have one that's outdated, as they'll probably have found out, it doesn't really increase their chances of attaining work and therefore haven't bothered to renew the certification by taking more exams.
So faced with such formidable foes in the job market, the realities will be a very limited set of opportunities for the newbie, who is trying to make 'in-roads' into the realm of the webmaster.
It's important to appreciate how experienced an experienced webmaster really is. There's a lot of web technologies out there, from the basic such as HTML, to advanced technologies such as Perl, PHP to various platform technologies such as LAMP, Apache and IIS.
Taking the webmaster role and extracting the portion which probably will give the newbie a chance, we need to focus on Web Analysis.
Web Analysis is a part of the webmasters role to ensure the websites they manage are managed correctly and that they are being utilised effectively by the visitors which use them.
This part of the webmasters role is often overlooked as it's deemed to be 'not as sexy' as the technical bits involving various web languages and the configuration and optimisation of the web platforms.