Lamb to the slaughter…?

[dr_qwertie]

Bit of a neophyte seeking some pearls of wisdom from those who have ‘gone before’. I currently have a full-time semi-IT role that I’m looking to ditch, as the yearly 2% pay rise ain’t gonna see me retiring early. That, and the fact job satisfaction is currently in negative figures.

I’ve worked on web pages, extended functionality in MS packages with VBA and created all-singing, all-dancing MS Access databases in the 5 years with my current FTSE100 employer. Also got a certificate in COBOL programming a million years ago that means nothing now, and even taught myself BASIC on a ZX81 when you could actually buy those things. I’ve sourced a training course to get me MCDBA in the near future.

My question? How feasible is it to get into IT contracting like this? Am I deluding myself? Should I cling to my paltry £26K salary rather than take the plunge? Is it worth just getting a perm IT role to get established first then look at contracting? Am I allowed to ask this many questions on my 1st posting? And why does toast always land butter-side down?

The reference ‘lamb to the slaughter’ is not so much my career change, more my hesitation in posting here for fear of the tag-team character assassination that appears to happen to anyone even slightly naïve.

That said…bring on the carnage (READ: any and all information/opinions gladly received).


Thanks in advance,

The dr.

[Cowboy Bob]

Bit of a neophyte seeking some pearls of wisdom from those who have ‘gone before’. I currently have a full-time semi-IT role that I’m looking to ditch, as the yearly 2% pay rise ain’t gonna see me retiring early. That, and the fact job satisfaction is currently in negative figures.

I’ve worked on web pages, extended functionality in MS packages with VBA and created all-singing, all-dancing MS Access databases in the 5 years with my current FTSE100 employer. Also got a certificate in COBOL programming a million years ago that means nothing now, and even taught myself BASIC on a ZX81 when you could actually buy those things. I’ve sourced a training course to get me MCDBA in the near future.

My question? How feasible is it to get into IT contracting like this? Am I deluding myself? Should I cling to my paltry £26K salary rather than take the plunge? Is it worth just getting a perm IT role to get established first then look at contracting? Am I allowed to ask this many questions on my 1st posting? And why does toast always land butter-side down?

The reference ‘lamb to the slaughter’ is not so much my career change, more my hesitation in posting here for fear of the tag-team character assassination that appears to happen to anyone even slightly naïve.

That said…bring on the carnage (READ: any and all information/opinions gladly received).


Thanks in advance,

The dr.

To be brutally honest, the only thing you've said that might be vaguely marketable for a contractor is being able to design web pages. For this you might, if you're lucky, get around £15 an hour, which in real terms is less than your £26k.

MS Access, as I'm sure you're aware, is not a real database - as in an enterprise level RDBMS. You'll need to be pretty clued up on your SQL to get any kind of contract role in the database arena (and Access's version of SQL is an abomination that bares little resemblance to the real thing from what I remember), and then you'd have to be fairly specific. The big one that I see on the market is Oracle. You can download a "development" version from their site to practice on, but be warned that you'll probably want to install it on a separate machine as it's very heavyweight. Or try out MySQL or PostgreSQL - both open source and free and wont kill your machine.

As for VBA, I find it hard to believe that there would be many contracting roles available for that either. I'd recommend graduating to VB.NET if you can if you want to leverage your VB experience - MS do an "Express" version of Visual Studio that is free for personal use that you could train yourself on. Though it has to be said that the main languages for contract roles that I see are Java/C#/C++/C/PHP so you may want to make a leap in the direction of one of those.

See, that wasn't too painful was it?

[mcquiggd]

Funnily enough you will actually find a lot of *big* financial institutions have departmental level apps, which use Access / Excel / VBA for quite important services... but you need business specific knowledge. Often the IT departments are frantically tryng to bring them into the fold but its always a lower priority than the big bucks projects so they often get lost in the system....

However, I agree that that is not a supportable career path....

.Net has now been around for several years and there is competition for the prime jobs.... mainly through people telling porkies on their CVs. Had a conversation today with an agent who said 'I put forward a guy who nearly got it - he had 5 years C# experience'. I laughed. I then asked if he had Visual Studio 2001 on his CV....? Agent didnt know....

If you do go .Net, go C#... people are normally asking for a C++ / Java background anyway for .Net developers... object oriented development isnt exactly synonymous with VB6.... best thing to do is stay permie, go C# / Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005, and then listen to me when I say 'do it this way' .. only kidding about the last bit!

[darmstadt]

Get your COBOL up to date (I presume its mainframe) as there is always call for COBOL contractors.

[expat]

Get your COBOL up to date (I presume its mainframe) as there is always call for COBOL contractors.

Do Your Own Research first (e.g. Jobserve.com). At the very least, the word "experienced" will probably be attached to "COBOL" in the job desc. However that's the old catch-22, get some experience and then you're off and running.

More to the point, contracts will often call for CICS or DB2 as well as COBOL.

But it is true that, out of what you mention, COBOL is more likely to be the name of a job requirement: the others tend to be just tools that will be asked for to do the job, not the job itself.

[malvolio]

By the way, in our defence,we usually help people who ask sensible questions, like you've just witnessed. It's people that can't be bothered to do even basic research (like, "How do I get paid?" or "Anyone using this fabulous offshore EBT?") that get smacked about a bit.

[thunderlizard]

To be brutal about it, your skills don't sound too saleable. Though mcquiggd's right - shouldn't turn our noses up at MS Access. Lots of customers love it to bits.

Instead, your 5 years with your employer should have given you a decent industry specialism. Setting up as an industry sector specialist, rather than a technology specialist, could get you more success.

[expat]

To be brutal about it, your skills don't sound too saleable. Though mcquiggd's right - shouldn't turn our noses up at MS Access. Lots of customers love it to bits.

Instead, your 5 years with your employer should have given you a decent industry specialism. Setting up as an industry sector specialist, rather than a technology specialist, could get you more success.

Agreed. What you list are less skill keywords that = the job, more tools that let you do the job. Identify the job that you can do with these tools.

[dr_qwertie]

Whew

Cheers for the wealth of wisdom and lack of p*ss-taking. I’m happy to have asked ‘sensible questions’ (point taken Malvolio), and thus, no CB, the experience was not too painful.

To be honest, I’ve got to get into the IT sector for my sanity. I’ve always been the local IT Whizz because I’ve always been in departments where mapping a printer is regarded as somewhat of a show of genius. I’m quite prepared to go in at entry-level to just ‘get in-there’. Which is why I was really trying to get a feel for which areas I could maybe have a head-start in with my basic skills.

I’ve had my CV out and had calls from agencies offering stuff like an analyst role for £200/day but with the learnings I have from this site, I’m hesitant to believe some of the positions existed, or the agencies didn't even bother to read my CV!

Funnily enough you will actually find a lot of *big* financial institutions have departmental level apps, which use Access / Excel / VBA for quite important services... but you need business specific knowledge. Often the IT departments are frantically tryng to bring them into the fold but its always a lower priority than the big bucks projects so they often get lost in the system....

However, I agree that that is not a supportable career path....

I’ve found that in the company I’m in – that’s why I ended up developing a lot of MS Access databases that had suitable bells & whistles, as there was never enough justification to make it an IT Project, but enough need that people approached me for them. Being in the scientific arena, making Excel jump through hoops is always popular as well. I understand about it not being a defined career-path as I can’t imagine too many companies taking time to hire to support pimped-up MS Office Apps. That said, it does seem like a nice niche if one could market oneself that way somehow.

To be brutal about it, your skills don't sound too saleable. Though mcquiggd's right - shouldn't turn our noses up at MS Access. Lots of customers love it to bits.

Instead, your 5 years with your employer should have given you a decent industry specialism. Setting up as an industry sector specialist, rather than a technology specialist, could get you more success.

This does sound quite feasible, I was just hoping to steer away from science (yawn) and try for the financial sector (cha-ching!). I have a soft-spot for databases & VB, but then only really having played with MS Access & Office I guess I can’t really say.

Would my training path of: MCSA + MCSE + MCDBA be worth it to at least get a small-time DBA perm role to get the ball-rolling. Then I could look to refresh the COBOL skills etc? Or should I just hang out for my Rock Band to be discovered?




Thanks all.

[threaded]

Just a thought: you said rock band. Do you know music? You could try going around games places and places like barcrest, they're always looking out for people who can code and also know about music.