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College Student looking for Advice

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by voidchild

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Hello all, Im a collge student looking for some career advice. I'm currently studying network telecommunications. I also love to design webpages. I know C/C++ and am currenlty teaching myself perl. I want to be a Net Admin, but I would also like to be in webdevolepment. Is there any careers that combines the two somehow? Also, on a side note, What do you think i should learn after perl? PhP, ASP, Etc? Thanks in advance

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by brian f wilson

Let's tackle the NetAdmin/WebDev job first...

I can't think of a canned job that exists out there for someone with both of these skillsets... but... You have a few options that will allow you to utilize these two different areas of expertise.
1)Get a NetAdmin job with a 'smaller' company. WebDevelopment is usually one of the last jobs smaller companies try to fill 'in-house'. Once you get established as a NetAdmin, you can offer to pick up the department's intranet site. Then work you way up to other intranet sites. Eventually you may secure the gig of internet dev.
2) The other option is to consult as a WebDev in your spare time while securing a nice cushy NetAdmin gig with a stable company.

Now on to where to go from perl...

With your C/C++ background, one would say that PHP is your next natural progression. PHP is VERY C-Like. It should be a breeze to pick up. Also, multiple webservers support it. With ASP, you would be tying yourself down to IIS. But the upside to ASP is there there are ALOT of IIS servers out there. ASP is usually a requirement for most WebDev jobs out there and PHP is more of a 'bonus' skillset. I personally would still go for PHP first though.

Hope this helps,
Brian Wilson

by brandonh

You might consider learning ASP first since your C/C++ skills will allow you to do more web application development (ISAPI dll's and custom objects). I agree that learning other languages is important (I still need to figure out Perl... :) Brandon

by juanita marquez

You might consider also looking regularly at various job advertisements in job boards/your local newspaper/wherever you want to wind up working, to see the kinds of skillsets, certifications, and salary ranges that employers are looking for. I don't know how close you are to finishing college, but at least you can see if you are headed in a direction that is in short supply and that may influence your decisions.

by teburlew

From a consulting standpoint, our clients are asking for people with C/C++, VB, and ASP; or, Java, Netscape, JSP backgrounds. If you have both, you are ahead of the game. Your Perl experience will assist greatly in Unix NetAdmin. I use it to create "quick and dirty" jobs. The only career that I know of combining the two is consulting where the more you know, the more marketable you are. In consulting, you get to wear many hats and do lots of varied stuff. Hope this helps.

by al macintyre

Consider the scenario of a company that has data inside their firewall that they want to post to their web page, or data that comes in via internet or e-mail or EDI & they want to get it to their internal business software application.

Net administration is more for relevant experience, while anyone supposedly can do web developement & most everyone does a rotten job of it, falling in love with graphics & forgetting what the purpose of the web page is & not learning how to get it on the search engines.

I think that someone with some training in traditional art layout of professional looking documents might have an advantage in web development.

When I was in college I took a class in touch typing, because I did not want to be hunt & peck on the keyboard.

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