Beginning the ISSD Program

Welcome to the University of Winnipeg. My name is Steve and I am in the final weeks of the Internet Systems Specialist Diploma (ISSD 19) program. Over the next little while I will be blogging on this site to give you my insight into the program as well as my experiences as I progress into the working world.

As I look back on the past year of my life, I am very happy to see how much things have changed, and how much I have moved forward. I'm not only speaking in terms of the knowledge I've gained from the course material, but also the options that are now available to me in the world. It can be a difficult decision to go back to school, especially if it's already been a decade since you last had any formal education. For some of us it had been longer, and for some of us less. Either way, if you're a new ISSD student, you've made a sizeable financial commitment which is really symbolic of your desire to shift gears, move forward, and get to a better and more prosperous place at the end of the year. For the first time in my life, I can look through job postings and feel like companies are looking for a skill that only I have. They are also willing to pay for it. I feel like it is me who has the bargaining power and that I will be interviewing them for a job. That feels like an ideal situation to be in.

As far as the program goes, you are going to learn bits of almost everything. For some of the earlier courses, you will walk out knowing pretty much all you need to know in that area. With a little more practice and experience, those areas will become second nature. Some of the other courses are much larger in scope and there is simply too much material to learn in a short time. You will, however, learn the fundamentals, and you will certainly have the tools to go deeper into the material if you choose to do so. This is exactly the beauty of the ISSD program. At the end of the program, you'll know pieces of almost every area, and you can then choose to specialize in one or two. This is very realistic to how the working world is anyway. Very few people can do everything and still produce high quality work. You're better off being an expert in one area, yet still being knowledgeable of the other areas so that you can communicate effectively with the other members of the team.

There are some excellent instructors throughout this program. You should take advantage of that and ask them questions whenever you have them. Sometimes the most valuable lessons are when an instructor gets sidetracked and starts talking about the industry, and their personal insights or experiences about certain areas. How much do you charge someone? How do you negotiate paperwork and contracts? They can provide realistic examples of difficult work situations and how to approach them.

Over the next several blog entries, I'll walk through the program, talking about each major section and what you can expect. In my next post I'll start with the first part of your program, which consists of design and your XHTML project.

Author: Steve Gomori