CIW
What Is CIW?
CIW (Certified Internet Webmaster or Certified Internet Web Professional as it is now called) is a certification. In the IT world, earning a certification usually means that you have met a company or organization’s standards in respect to a product or field of study. These standards are usually measured by a person’s ability to pass an exam. Once that has been achieved, the person has at least some level of expertise in the field and can begin building upon it. Think of a certification as a high school diploma that takes less work, less time, and can get a you a better job.
According to it’s creator, Prosoft Training, a CIW certification is different than other certifications because it is “vendor-neutral.” This means that it’s not limited to a specific company’s product as are the Microsoft MCSE, Cisco CCNA, Novell CNA, etc. The emphasis is placed on “job skills rather than software or hardware skills.” A candidate who obtains a Master CIW Designer certification could choose to design with a variety of tools based on the work requirements instead of from the perspective of a particular product or programming language.
CIW has become the industry standard for webmaster certification. Prosoft Training reports that over 30,000 certifications have been issued. CIW certifications can be used by career changers to break into the IT field or by experienced IT professionals who want to solidify their skills. Prosoft Training encourages successful candidates to use their certifications to promote themselves. A webmaster, designer, or developer with a CIW certification should have a better chance of winning a customer’s business. You can find out everything you need to know about becoming a Certified Internet Webmaster from the official CIW website.
What Ever Happened To The Certified Internet Webmaster Certification?
Since I have a deep appreciation for the CIW certification program, I
decided to revisit this topic and see what has happened since I passed the CIW
Site Designer exam 5+ years ago.
Certified Internet Webmaster. You may have heard of it – more than 50,000 people worldwide have been awarded at least one CIW certificate since the program began.
It’s the leading vendor-neutral certification program in Internet technology and web development and is aimed at providing people with real-world, useful and adaptable web technology skills.
When I was awarded my CIW Site Designer certification, quite a few years ago, CIW was newer and had recently merged with Novell’s ground-breaking CIP (Certified Internet Professional) program.
At the time of the merger (December 2000), prospective webmasters considering becoming CIW’s may have had doubts about the program’s real-world credibility -there are a lot of certification programs that really don’t mean anything to employers. This merger likely helped to reassure many that CIW was substantial and would be recognized – at the time of the merger, Novell’s VP for Education, Debbie Maucieri described it as
“a worldwide standard for vendor-neutral Internet certification.”
I didn’t think that an Internet giant like Novell would endorse and direct their students towards a certification program that wasn’t of real value to those who took part in it.
What’s Happened Since?
By 2002, I had decided I would like to add a CIW certification to my resume, and after looking at the different certification pathways on offer decided that the one which best-fitted my needs was the CIW Site Designer certification.
This involved taking a total of three modules which combined to give me a thorough grounding in Internet technologies, website design and ecommerce – essential for anyone interested in a career as a web designer. As I recall, there were even some rudimentary SEO topics that came up for study, mostly on-site markup and meta tags stuff. Things have certainly changed in that area.
Since then, I have managed to build the career I wanted as a professional web designer/webmaster/SEO. It didn’t happen overnight, but my CIW certification and the experience it gave me definitely helped get me going in the right direction so I could later prove my abilities and motivation to employers. I studied for my CIW certificate in my spare time while I was working a low stress day job.
Quite a few years have passed since I started down the road to being a professional webmaster, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the CIW program has developed in that time.
New Technology, New Curriculum
As anyone who’s been using the Internet for the last five years knows, web technologies have really changed a lot in that time, as has web design. It’s good to see that Prosoft Learning, owners of the CIW program, have also kept up with these changes.
Over the last couple of years they have been gradually introducing a new version of their syllabus, v5. While it’s based on the same broad-base, vendor-neutral principles of the curriculum I studied, it has been substantially updated to reflect changing times and new technologies.
Just a few of the new technical areas covered are:
- Windows Server 2003
- Internet Explorer 7 & Firefox 2 (only introduced in 2006)
- New web technologies such as RSS, SVG and XML – all essential tools for a
webmaster
The updated courses also include more in-depth and current information on ecommerce – such as current server technologies and a look at customer acquisition and retention processes. This was an area that was in its youth when I took this course, but has really matured and grown in refinement since then.
It’s good that the CIW training has been updated to include this kind of information – understanding areas like customer retention, interface design and accessibility is essential if you are to have any credibility as a webmaster with web design skills.
Membership Growth
It’s not just the curriculum that has grown and matured, however – the CIW member base has too. More than 81,000 certificates have now been awarded to over 50,000 CIW members – a remarkable increase from the 12,000 members the CIW
program had at the time of the Novell CIP merger in December 2000.
That means an average of nearly 6,000 new CIW members each year – of whom an increasing number come from schools, colleges and adult education programs.
One of Prosoft Learning’s major successes in recent years appears to have been establishing the credibility of its curriculum with the public education sector.
February 2006 saw Prosoft enter into a partnership with the Washington state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to offer CIW in selected public schools from fall 2006 onwards.
This partnership is Prosoft’s 12th such agreement and the CIW curriculum is now the standard curriculum for IT and web technologies in 12 states. As a consequence it is being offered to thousands of new students as part of secondary and adult education programs.
I’m not sure how many of these students are eligible to join the certification scheme itself, but this widespread adoption is a powerful endorsement of the credibility and recognition that educators give to the CIW curriculum.
Business Changes & Awards
It’s not just educators that recognize the value of the CIW program, either. In 2004, it won the award for “Best Internet Certification” in a survey of CertCities.com’s 30,000 members.
2004 also saw the addition of the CIW program to Thomson Course Technology’s courseware portfolio. Thomson is the largest courseware vendor in the world and this agreement means has given far greater reach to the CIW program.
Prosoft Learning itself changed ownership in 2006, as it was acquired by VCampus, a large online learning company. One of the first new deals announced under the new ownership was that CIW examination fees are now covered by Veterans Affairs education benefits – good news for all concerned.
2006 also saw the relaunch of the CIWCertified.com website, featuring real-life CIW success stories from CIW-qualified individuals, educational case studies and a fresh, modern design.
The Future for CIW
People always raise questions about the credibility and usefulness of vendor-neutral certification programs like CIW, but my experience is that they have a number of advantages over the more common vendor-specific courses.
The focus of the CIW program is not just on teaching specific skills, but on teaching important design and thought processes – processes that do stand the test of time and can be used in a number of situations.
Unlike many vendor programs, the CIW does not expire – because it doesn’t need to. The skills I was taught continue to be useful to me today, more than five years on, and have enabled me to learn and develop more easily than I would have done otherwise.
It looks like the future is bright for CIWs – it certainly should be.
CIW Resources
Free CIW Certification Practice Exams:
- CIW Certification Foundations Practice Exam – Take this 15 question CIW certification exam to practice or test your chances of passing the real CIW exam.
- CIW Certification Site Designer Practice Exam – So you passed the CIW Foundations exam and you’re looking for another CIW certification challenge? Try this 15 question CIW certification practice exam.
CIW Study Notes and Diary
- CIW Certification Foundations Study Notes – Some essentials needed to pass the CIW certification Foundations exam.
- CIW Exam Diary – An IT worker’s diary describes his experience taking the CIW certification Foundations exam, the first exam for all CIW certification tracks.
CIW Book Reviews
- CIW Foundations for Dummies Book Review – Read a review of the recommended book that helped the Clickfire webmaster and certified “dummy” pass the CIW Certification Foundations exam.
- CIW Site Designer Certification Bible Book Review – Definitely not a Dummies book. Read our book review of this 600+ page volume of information, tips, and CIW certification practice exams that teach you how to pass the Site Designer CIW exam.
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