Web Development Careers & Degrees

Web Development has been booming as a career field since its dawn in the early 2000s. Many major universities saw its promising future in the years to come and thus introduced various fields for diplomas and degrees in web development.

Web development along with some other IT fields have shown great outcome and have affected many aspects of life throughout the world. Take Facebook, for example, Mark Zuckerberg is a dropout from Harvard University who started the world’s biggest social media platform from his dorm room. The company which was purely a website at that time is now among the world’s most valuable companies.

This is one of the main reasons why more and more people are shifting to web development rather than software development. As on the internet, anyone can hit it big!
There’s almost a trend now shifting from pure native software development to web development and hybrid application development.

Keeping all this in mind, The web development field has become vast with many subfields and careers coming under its umbrella. Some are as follows;

Web Development Careers

These are some of the career tracks that companies offer to web developers.

• Front-end Developer
• Back-end Developer
• Full Stack Engineer
• Software Engineer
• Senior Web Developer

Many big companies prefer to hire experienced Web developers. So it really helps for students in college, to have some part-time internship experience or even solo/demo projects that they can showcase.

At this time, a student’s focus must be on filling their resume with credible work even if that means working without any profit. This way whatever degree you are pursuing will have some projects that you can show as experience.

Here are some more positions that require basic skills in Web development. Some of these are best for entry-level graduates, and some require additional training of a few years either on the job or through an online web developer Bootcamp.

Web Administrators

Web administrators are overall responsible for development and maintenance of a Web site or web platform. Usually, large companies offer this job to experienced candidates.

Web Administrators overlook web developers and web designers in everyday tasks.

Web Designers

Web designers make the UI and design of the website, they focus on the look and feel of a website. Web designers are responsible for the text and graphics on web pages, they have knowledge of tools like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.

The position of web designers requires an artistic and imaginative nature and most fresh graduates can easily be hired as Web designers.

Webmaster

A webmaster’s responsibility includes a quality check of the whole Web site including content and making sure that the website runs and performs the same among most of the latest web browsers out there. Webmaster serves a role of getting both web administrators and web developers on the same page, and maintain a check and balance of workforce throughout the project.

The skill set required for a webmaster is somewhat a mixture of web administrator and web designer.

Web Programmers

Web programmers heavily rely on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The responsibility off a web programmer is to make a web designers idea come to reality within a browser. Web programmers provide a basic working website that was first only in the design phase but now is working and testable on the browser.

Web Application Developer

A web application developer is kind of a combination of both web designer and web programmer with some extra skills. Most companies these days focus on getting their hands on good web application developers with most skills, as this one job actually fills two or three different positions.

A good web app developer can design, test and maintain a whole web application. Mostly when thinking of a web developer, full-stack developer or front end developer comes to mind.

Web Server Developer

This position is also known as a backend developer. Web server developer or back-end developer focus on creating the whole system architecture. This includes what databases will be used, what relations will be made within that database, what kind of security will be implemented, and whether the whole system will be scalable with time or not.

This is a key position in any organization or project as the future of the project heavily depends on the quality of work put in by the web server developer.

Most of the skills for these upper mentioned careers can be obtained online by going through various web development courses available online or various web developer boot camps that happen from time to time.

Web Development Degrees

Many universities are now offering a major in web development. Which is what one might want in order to become a web developer. But companies don’t find it completely necessary for a good web developer to have a degree in this field.

However, if you acquire a college degree in any IT or software related field you can still get a job as a web developer. The reason is that many software engineering degrees focus some key courses on the web and internet (for example; web engineering, database engineering, UI engineering, etc).

If you have done a proper 4 year bachelors in any software field chances are you might already have had two or three courses specifically on web development. This is why it is easy for students with any software related degree to transform or jump into Web development.

Here are some of the degrees that you can choose from in order to become a web developer:

• Bachelors in Computer Science
• Bachelors in Information Technology
• Bachelors in Information Science
• Bachelor in Computer Systems and Software
• Bachelors in administrative computer systems
• Bachelor in computer technology
• Bachelor in Programming and Internet Technologies

Although there might be many other web development related degrees out there. These are the ones that are offered in many countries. Many successful web developers out there mostly have one of these degrees.

Conclusion

In the end, web development is a skill based career which you should only pursue if you are passionate about it. Otherwise, it can become very dull and is not everyone’s taste.

Focusing on which degree is important to become a web developer is probably not the best approach to becoming a good web developer. Rather its better to understand which career path is best for you and which career path under web development do you naturally fall into.

For instance, many front-end developers hate backend development and vice versa. So, it is better to pick your own flavor when diving into web development and find which above mentioned position suits you the best.