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Training web developers

posted by Eric Puidokas August 10th, 2006

I’ve put a lot of thought lately into training new employees in website layout creation.  The position I’m describing receives a PSD mockup of a website and is responsible for converting it into html and css code.  When we hire employees, they usually don’t have the complete skill set required to make accessible, standards compliant webpages.  The other aspect of the training is it must be able to be done with minimal instruction.  We simply don’t have the resources to devote that much attention to every new employee.
The first step was to define the required skills and decide the order in which to learn them. 

I’d like to address these issues separatly, as it’s a lot of info for a single post.  First, I’d like to discuss the best way to gauge previous knowledge and teach the basics of HTML, XHTML, and CSS.  I’ve found that the best resource (not suprisingly) is w3schools.com.  They have really in depth tutorials of each of the 3 coding standards.  This is great because it allows new employees to start learning on their own.  The less hand holding, the better.

Another great thing about w3schools.com  are the quizzes they offer.  The 20 question, multiple choice tests give a quick and easy way to evaluate someone’s skills.  You wouldn’t want to make someone go through all of the tutorials if they already know what they’re doing.

After asking a couple coworkers to take the tests, I came up with these benchmarks for what constitutes a good understanding of the coding standards:

HTML Quiz
19/20 correct
< 3:00 minutes

XHTML Quiz
18/20 correct
< 3:30 minutes

CSS Quiz
18/20 correct
< 3:20 minutes

Go try them out for yourself.  You might be in for a suprise.

In my next post, I will address how best to teach someone layout techniques, and how to choose the best method for each case.

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