Workshops can be offered as a major benefit by a lot of certification companies. When you talk to most IT hopefuls who have used them, you'll find they generally end up being seen as a difficulty to be 'got round' because of many things:

- Lots of round journeys - sometimes hundreds of miles at a time.

- Getting time out of work - a lot of training companies will only provide Mon-Fri class availability - typically grouping 2 or 3 days together. This can be hard for a lot of working people, and it's made more problematic if travelling time is added into the mix.

- The majority of us end up feeling 20 days holiday per year isn't enough by far. Sacrifice a good 50 percent of that for study classes and see your problems doubled.

- With the high costs involved, a lot of companies make the classes quite large - not ideal (and much less personal).

- Often attendees want to progress quickly, others want a more steady pace and be allowed to set their own speed. This will often generate tension and bad atmosphere a lot of the time.

- Never forget the extra expense of travelling and over-night accommodation either. Often, this will cost 00's or even 000's extra. Work it out - you'll get a shock.

- All of us want some privacy. We don't want to risk throwing away any advancement at our current place of work because we're getting trained in a different area.

- Raising questions in a class full of students often makes us a little nervous. Have you ever left a question un-asked because you didn't want to look foolish?

- Usually, workshops become basically unreachable, in cases where you live or work away from home for some of the month.

It obviously makes much more sense to be trained when it's convenient for you - not the company - and exploit interactive videos of instructors teaching a class. Just imagine... If you've got a notebook PC then you're free to study wherever you want. And live 24x7 support is only a web-click away at times of difficulty. It's never going to matter how often you feel you need to repeat something, video-based teachers won't ever lose patience! And don't forget, in this situation, there's no need to take notes. Everything is already there for you. Though this doesn't avoid every little difficulty, it surely removes stress and makes things simpler. You've also got less hassle, costs and travel.

The Adobe Creative Suite is the most commercially popular design-environment employed by web designers nowadays. These key tools are currently (2010) on Version 4. Whilst Adobe Flash gives access to animated & interactive 'graphical' content, Dreamweaver is the software which builds sites. You could say that Dreamweaver is the Word-Processor of the Adobe Creative Suite series. It will let you place graphics and text in accordance with particular rules & parameters, and then develop basic interactivity through page-linking. Just like other web design-environments, Dreamweaver creates the program code 'HTML' in the background (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language). In essence, this language of web browsers' is actually a script which draws & controls the page being viewed. Associated with HTML are the lay-out tag languages like XML and CSS. These enable more streamlined 'HTML' coding and more efficient lay-out methods, that will work on multiple platforms (because they are standardised). What this means is the web page will appear the same on Microsoft 'Internet Explorer', Mozilla Firefox, 'Opera', Safari etc. (at least, that's the idea!) And so although you're laying graphic-blocks and adding text, in the background, 'Dreamweaver' is converting what you're doing into code. If you are going to be a commercially viable web-designer, you will have to have a thorough knowledge of these languages.

Quite often, students have issues with one aspect of their training which doesn't even occur to them: The way the training is divided into chunks and packaged off through the post. Many companies enrol you into a program spread over 1-3 years, and drop-ship the materials to you piecemeal as you get to the end of each exam. Sounds reasonable? Well consider these facts: Sometimes the steps or stages pushed by the company's salespeople doesn't suit all of us. You may find it a stretch to finalise every element inside their defined time-scales?

In an ideal situation, you want everything at the start - so you'll have them all for the future to come back to - at any time you choose. This allows a variation in the order that you attack each section if another more intuitive route presents itself.

Any program that you're going to undertake must provide a properly recognised qualification at the finale - definitely not some 'in-house' plaque for your wall. The top IT companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe or CompTIA all have internationally renowned skills programmes. Major-league companies like these can make sure you stand out at interview.