One way to earn money as a web designer is to participate in a web design education program. Becoming a web design educator can combine your love of web design and your desire to teach. Use the considerations below to determine whether teaching web design is a good career choice for you.
Your web design skills can allow you to both work as a web designer and teach. There are currently many part-time job opportunities based on educating others on how to learn and use web design.
Currently there is not a fixed degree path for web design educators. Courses that offer training in web design include associate degree or bachelor’s degrees in graphic arts or online graphic arts or education. If you obtain an education degree you’ll want to make sure that web design courses are part of the course choices within your education degree.
While the lack of formal degrees in web design per se can be frustrating if you want to pursue web design education as a career it can work as an opportunity for you to begin pursuing that career without worrying about obtaining a specific credential.
Use your resume as a web designer and adapt it for use as a web design educator. This means that in addition to including your employment as a web designer or samples of your original web designs, you’ll want to indicate any positions you held where you were responsible for conveying information to a group in an instructional manner. This can include training sessions you conducted, webinars you created and so on indicating your ability to communicate with students.
As a web design instructor you can approach local outlets for adult education or small business organizations to see whether a web design class would be something they might offer to their membership.
Consider taking at least one web design course yourself to better understand the format and lesson plans being used in such courses. You can piggyback your own desire to better learn about some aspect of web design with your goal of better preparing to teach web design by taking a course in a specific area that you are interested in.
Read classified ads for corporate web design jobs and focus your resume’s educational section in that direction. For instance if most ads you see are seeking experts in using CSS for page layouts and you are competent in their use, highlight your experience with CSS layouts. You will likely have to have a portfolio of work to back up claims of expertise.
Go to community colleges in your area and see whether they have job openings for instructors in web design. Community colleges are frequently better geared up for real-world settings than other educational sites and will have courses that are helpful in the job market immediately.
Your skills as a web designer can be used to work as an educator in web design. Consider the suggestions above if you are thinking about a career in web design education.