What are Computer Specialist?

What can you do with a Computer Programming Specialist Certificate?

• My local junior college offers a certificate of completion program for computer programming specialist. You get a certificate, just like you would say if you were a pharmacy tech. Its a 16-17 unit coarse. What kind of jobs could you get with something like this? Where in California do you think i would have to move or commute to this kind of job? The good thing is that I'll get this certificate before i even get an AS in Comp Sci. Sooo i might as well get it right?

• Answer:

  A programming specialist? That sounds as general as a degree in "computers", if you know what I mean. There are so many little niche areas of expertise that are very employable. The problem is you have to be an expert at something because to get employed you have to be good enough at something to make money for the company. Hopefully you'll cover one or a few popular languages in great _working_ detail. Beyond just learning the syntax, there are a lot of things to figure out before an employer is going to find you to be worth much. What you aren't going to learn in school is how to be a good program designer, such as how to solve seemingly complex problems (with whatever languages, tools, etc.) without breaking a sweat. I think that takes at least a little bit of talent and a good bit of experience. If you live near a big city, there are programming jobs nearby. The trick is getting your foot in the door and getting promoted, even if you don't get hired for programming initially. You might want to see what you can do to demonstrate your skills, such as write a game or some little application that shows that you can do something from start to finish. If the company is not too big and corporate, then some little demo may be worth a lot, especially if you can show them the code and it looks nice and clean. I don't know how much the economy has recovered in the last year or so, but I remember a lot of qualified people looking for work, so that may raise the bar to require at least a BS before you can really take your pick at what job you want to throw yourself at. On the other hand, being self-taught, I've always thought a BS is B.S. and if you're very engineering minded, you definitely CAN do anything you want, it's just that you have to convince your hiring manager to pick you. I lucked out and managed to do that near the end of the dot-com boom, and have been happily employed since. I just hope that people like me these days can do the same thing. I guess the bottom line is: YES. Get the certificate. If it makes you take an extra class, it'll still be worth it. Not so much the certificate (which is a nice line-item resume filler,) but the extra time spent around other people in your industry. Sometimes classes are great because not just of the subject material, but you get to see how your professor thinks. For example, I still remember a class I took 15 years ago: "Printf is the Swiss army knife of debugging".