Getting back in...Help/Advice anyone...?

[elizendon]

Hi

wondered if anyone has any help or advice on getting back into contracting. Have been out of the industry for the last 3 years (no sinister reasons, just took some family time). Been sending out CVs but have failed to get past the front door, so to speak.

I appreciate that my skills may be a bit dated, MCDBA with a few past roles in database development and development on SQL Server 2000 and 2005, but I still think I have a lot to offer the right employer or the wrong one for that matter..!! I'm currently completing the MCITP - Database Administrator certification in an effort to make my skills more current.

I am looking in the areas of database development and I'm willing to start at junior roles, if needs be, but have hit a brick wall in terms of getting through to employers.

Any, sensible, ideas/advice on how I could move forward...?

many thanks

[craig1]

I'd be very tempted to recommend you go permanent for a year or two to build up your skills and experience again. The contract market is brutal just now and if you don't have either good, recent experience or very niche and hard-to-find skills then you'll struggle badly to even get recruitment agencies to take your calls.

I'd suggest that if you really want to go contracting that you're going to have to exploit your existing contacts and friends very hard, make sure they know you're looking and hope you get a sniff of a role before it gets advertised. Going toe-to-toe with the contractors out there and the F5-Apply crowd for advertised jobs will be a hard and probably demoralising task for you.

[Petal]

Getting back in...Help/Advice anyone...?

I'm in the roughly the same boat...

How are you explaining your time off and what sort of response are you getting?

After my last contract ended in August 2008 I went on holiday. Shortly after I came back to the UK people started dying like flies! I have lost 8 people in total : 4 members of my immediate family, 2 friends of the family that I had known since I was a child and two personal friends. Having gone through that much bereavement I wasn't in the frame of mind to hunt for roles during a recession so I let it go for a while and dealt with some personal things that were very much in my mind after such an experience.

Now I'm raring to get back to work. I have spent the last couple of months brushing up my skill set via training courses, webinars, online labs, research papers, etc... etc... etc... My CV is up to date, on various sites and I am slowly starting to get calls from agents. The only problem I've got now is that most agents think that they have an old copy of my CV as there is nothing on it after August 2008. I want to explain the gap and put it on my CV but I don't want to give people an excuse not to ring at all. I've had a goodly trawl through the postings and death isn't something to hide so I've been merrily telling everybody who's called me what's happened and what I've been up to regarding training and whathaveyou. Some people aren't bothered in the slightest as long as my skill set is up to date, some people can't get me off the phone quickly enough.

I'm doing as craig1 suggests and exploiting my existing contacts and friends but having been a contractor for nearly 15 years I'm not entirely convinced that I want to go permy as yet.

Good luck to you.

Petal.