The skills of tiling lie with a combination of practical and technical ability, acquired depth of knowledge and experience, all wrapped up with a flair for design and presentation. It's often the reason why many men and women take up the trade as a full time professional tiler because there is always a new design challenge to solve and the results are satisfyingly on display when completed!At the heart of tiling is the core problem of creating a visually neat and perfectly harmonious layout! Every wall or floor space is different with the central challenge of arranging tiles around doors and windows, features and fittings, top to bottom, left to right, using the most of each tile!The attention to the smallest spacing will have a big impact on the final result. We all can simply look at a finished wall of tiling and respond to the level of workmanship in the fine detail and we feel it's either pleasing and right or it's not! Many amateur DIY tilers can spend many frustrating hours on their own home projects and still not see why the results are not working as they should!There are many types of tiling courses available today, according to individual requirement. A short wall tiling course at basic diploma level can be extremely useful to obtain the key essentials in just a day or two, while a 5 day introductory tiling course provides an invaluable opportunity to become more acquainted with a number of necessary subject areas and their accompanying skillsets.The basic principals of setting out wall tiles can include a long checklist of items, ranging from laying the tiles evenly around a horizontal feature, e.g. window or basin so that equal width tiles are on both sides, trying to achieve a full tile height above the side of a bath or worktop to avoiding the use of narrow strips of tiles at corners and at the top and bottom of a wall and aiming to end with a full tile where the tiles only go partly up or along a wall.Achieving equal tile width at the ends and equal height at top and bottom of a wall can lead to off centre tiling around a major feature with tiles too narrow and therefore, very hard to cut along the edges. Aligning the pattern to a main feature can lead, once again, to tiles being too narrow along the edges and especially, great difficulty to cut an L shaped tile where both arms are narrow. Where patterns are involved or oblong tiles, additional considerations will be added to an ever growing checklist!Basic guidelines can often sound or look simple when read from a DIY manual or online, but the reality can be very different when getting hands-on! The essence of tiling is always about trying to place tiles evenly about a feature which may lead to narrow end tiles. Some rooms will, inevitably, appear to be almost impossible to tile in a manner that satisfactorily meets all the standard guidelines!However, there are ways to overcome specific problems and professional tiling courses are the best way to learn the theory and body of knowledge underpinning the precise skills needed to obtain verified NVQ tiling course qualification standard to progress a career within the construction industry.