Reskilling yourself in such a fast moving industry

[Rabotnik]

It's no good learning the skills unless there is a job on your CV where you can demonstrate commercial experiences of this skill.

I would never learn a skill and lie on my CV by saying for example, I have 6 months experience of SiteCore from client a and 3 more month experience with client B.

But I know people do this. Yes, learn something on an online course and wing it at the interview.

It make me mad I would never be fraudulent like this so I won't play by these rules but many people are at it and I've seen it happen.

I wish the clients would spend a bit more time poking around into the veracity of the skills claimed by a candidate on his CV and if they find out they've been lying then pursue these frauds with the full force of the law.

I had this problem when I was benched for 3 months this year. I spent hours learning Hadoop so I could move on from SQL Server, but all the jobs require you have to have delivered some huge Hadoop projects. I kept learning anyway just in case I got a job somewhere which was considering moving on to Hadoop since then I would be more valuable to them.

I ended up just getting a short contract at the NHS via my old boss.

[dwater]

It's no good learning the skills unless there is a job on your CV where you can demonstrate commercial experiences of this skill.

I would never learn a skill and lie on my CV by saying for example, I have 6 months experience of SiteCore from client a and 3 more month experience with client B.

But I know people do this. Yes, learn something on an online course and wing it at the interview.

It make me mad I would never be fraudulent like this so I won't play by these rules but many people are at it and I've seen it happen.

I wish the clients would spend a bit more time poking around into the veracity of the skills claimed by a candidate on his CV and if they find out they've been lying then pursue these frauds with the full force of the law.

Yeah, it's annoying. I've heard people say they do such things. I don't.

However, it doesn't take much to be enough to put it on your CV, and that is usually enough to get you a match. If you have the skill mentioned on your CV and you supplement it by studying it in your spare time such that you become expert, *and you can demonstrate it in an interview*, then most clients won't care and just hire you. You can even do some project or join some open source project so that the code is there for them to see, and you can demonstrate what you've done in the interview. The first step, imo, is to have it on your CV, and be able to talk intelligently about it to an agent, so they are convinced - not too difficult, I think - I find they rule me out for no good reason just because I don't have this-or-that on my CV (I now put *everything* I've been involved with down, even if i really never want to use it again).

Finding some high profile open source project to work on while your on the bench, where you can make a name for yourself would seem to be a good idea. Spend time on the relevant slack channel and solve other people's problems helps you get proficient too.

If you have a good idea for a project, then perhaps you can market it as a product and sell it under your company name (or give it away for free, but licenced).

All this takes motivation, though, and I find it a real challenge to keep myself motivated.

[uk contractor]

It's no good learning the skills unless there is a job on your CV where you can demonstrate commercial experiences of this skill.

I would never learn a skill and lie on my CV by saying for example, I have 6 months experience of SiteCore from client a and 3 more month experience with client B.

But I know people do this. Yes, learn something on an online course and wing it at the interview.

It make me mad I would never be fraudulent like this so I won't play by these rules but many people are at it and I've seen it happen.

I wish the clients would spend a bit more time poking around into the veracity of the skills claimed by a candidate on his CV and if they find out they've been lying then pursue these frauds with the full force of the law.

I agree with you & this is also widespread IME.
I would take an educated guess it perfectly describes 75% of the IT contracting industry sadly! So many people are serial blaggers who just say anything to land the contract then try to wing it once onsite

[pauldee]

I think people need to get real on all sides here.

If you're a client, you're probably not going to find a contractor who's fully proficient in all thirteen of the languages/frameworks/methodologies you're currently using in your current area at the current time.

If you're an agent, you're probably not going to find one for them.

And if you're a contractor, you're probably not going to be able to ride out the rest of your career with .Net and jQuery anymore.

The real new skill is being able to pick up any new languages and frameworks that are thrown at you, using the existing programming principles you currently have. This means you need to understand the basic principles of programming, and in my experience that is something seriously missing in permies and contractors alike of all levels.

Clients and agents need to be able to evaluate contractors based on the skill of 'being a developer' rather than 'knowing PHP'. It just doesn't work like that anymore.

The small hipster agencies know this. I tend to switch around between the hipster hoodie shops and the big corporate suit shops. The hipsters will expect you to pick up Scala or Kotlin if they throw it at you, and in turn, there staff will turn themselves to anything you give them. Before I left my last hipster shop, I handed over an Angular project to someone who had never looked at Angular before. Within a few days he was running with it.

The language/framework proliferation is not slowing down. If anything, it's accelerating.

Convert this post into your own domain language if you're a PM/BA/whatever.

[cojak]

There is a difference between saying you've 6 months experience or saying you have XXX awareness (with the training/certification to go with it).

I've got work on the back of this, in fact I've got work by being on the same training course as the PM.

[Bee]

I think people need to get real on all sides here.

If you're a client, you're probably not going to find a contractor who's fully proficient in all thirteen of the languages/frameworks/methodologies you're currently using in your current area at the current time.

If you're an agent, you're probably not going to find one for them.

And if you're a contractor, you're probably not going to be able to ride out the rest of your career with .Net and jQuery anymore.

The real new skill is being able to pick up any new languages and frameworks that are thrown at you, using the existing programming principles you currently have. This means you need to understand the basic principles of programming, and in my experience that is something seriously missing in permies and contractors alike of all levels.

Clients and agents need to be able to evaluate contractors based on the skill of 'being a developer' rather than 'knowing PHP'. It just doesn't work like that anymore.

The small hipster agencies know this. I tend to switch around between the hipster hoodie shops and the big corporate suit shops. The hipsters will expect you to pick up Scala or Kotlin if they throw it at you, and in turn, there staff will turn themselves to anything you give them. Before I left my last hipster shop, I handed over an Angular project to someone who had never looked at Angular before. Within a few days he was running with it.

The language/framework proliferation is not slowing down. If anything, it's accelerating.

Convert this post into your own domain language if you're a PM/BA/whatever.

This post could not be better. Outstanding

[Hobosapien]

Anyone seen any good forecasts for skill requirements covering the next 5-10 years and beyond?

What are the current/upcoming/next big things that are likely to struggle to find people with the right skills and therefore will need contractors with those skills?

No point reskilling into an already or likely saturated market, or one that has the hamster running ever faster on the wheel (e.g. web dev with endless frameworks all doing the same thing, taking data and putting it into a browser ).

Maybe we should invent our own technical solutions and frameworks and covertly introduce them into client implementations, then we can corner the market for ourselves and be in control of how they evolve.

[fool]

Anyone seen any good forecasts for skill requirements covering the next 5-10 years and beyond?

What are the current/upcoming/next big things that are likely to struggle to find people with the right skills and therefore will need contractors with those skills?

No point reskilling into an already or likely saturated market, or one that has the hamster running ever faster on the wheel (e.g. web dev with endless frameworks all doing the same thing, taking data and putting it into a browser ).

Maybe we should invent our own technical solutions and frameworks and covertly introduce them into client implementations, then we can corner the market for ourselves and be in control of how they evolve.

So I've interviewed an insane amount of devops people in the last couple of weeks. Moving past the "devops isn't a job title" thing and we've got a ton of people selling themselves as "senior devops" who either don't know the basics of the underlying technologies, and as such can't answer the following questions:

How do you get a server?
How do you configure said server?
How do you get your code on the server?
How do you do automate this?

For the ones who can answer these questions, we move towards the problem statement:

You have N* non-heterogeneous applications; what problems do you face and how do you deal with them?

Answer those questions and you'll probably be good for the next 20 years I imagine.

[Hobosapien]

Answer those questions and you'll probably be good for the next 20 years I imagine.

That's a bold statement, and if true you could make money selling the answers to those questions for the blaggers that want the easy interview.

I wonder who the visionaries are these days that can offer food for thought on what is coming next and where their blogs/books are?

Cloud, big data, AI, automation, robotics, IoT, augmented reality, cyber wars, ... it always sounds so much more interesting than what has gone before yet much of it will require the same old skillsets revamped to cater for these 'new' ideas.

[rocktronAMP]

I had this problem when I was benched for 3 months this year. I spent hours learning Hadoop so I could move on from SQL Server, but all the jobs require you have to have delivered some huge Hadoop projects. I kept learning anyway just in case I got a job somewhere which was considering moving on to Hadoop since then I would be more valuable to them.

I ended up just getting a short contract at the NHS via my old boss.

See the Gartner Technology Hype Cycles or Thoughtworker Technology Radar and all that good tulip out there about technology adoption curves. At least, you understand Hadoop now and maybe you could also learn Cassandra and Spark. I haven't bother with it, because big data / ETL is really not my thing. In terms of Hadoop, you might even grab a basic contract gig. It would have been worth the shout if one day you did eventually get a gig with it. The point is that it has to be your passion if you want client's to judge your future performance.

Hadoop is the wave then in 2016, however it might be on the precipice of "the trough of disillusionment"

Today, I am learning Haskell for the fun of it. I am betting on more functional programming coming through or being influential in years to come. The learned FP people say learn Haskell.

BTW: I can remember when I was starting out as graduate and I was seeing the old Computer Weekly magazine and it had 100 ASA-400 jobs. Comnputer Weekly was a thick magazine in the 1990s. I don't even know if they still print it. I have not seen a copy in W H Smith for several years. But anyway, I digress. Way back then, I had my heart on becoming the next C++ Guru, I wanted to be as good as Stroustrop or somebody. Little did I know then a few years later, Java would be the thing I would be I doing for a long long while. It is always the LEFTFIELD that blinds you in the end.