Do Long-Term contracts look good on your CV?

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

Just completed a year at good old radders (I think a congrats is in order NLUK).

I have another 6 months which will take me up to December.

Is this something that future clientcos will see as a good thing and will it help me get future gigs?

Previously I had contract durations of 9 months, 3 months, 4 months, 10 months and then 4 months again..... This one will be the longest by quite a way....

[TheFaQQer]

Depends on what the client is looking for, and what you've been doing.

If they want someone with a proven track record of troubleshooting issues, delivering quick turnarounds before moving onto another troubleshooter role, then having a CV of long-roles isn't attractive.

If they want someone to be a pseudo-permie who just does what they are told for a long time, then having a CV with long-term BoS roles is a good thing.

If they want a happy medium, then it's probably somewhere in the middle.

[tranceporter]

Just completed a year at good old radders (I think a congrats is in order NLUK).

I have another 6 months which will take me up to December.

Is this something that future clientcos will see as a good thing and will it help me get future gigs?

Previously I had contract durations of 9 months, 3 months, 4 months, 10 months and then 4 months again..... This one will be the longest by quite a way....

I used to work with a pretty senior contractor at Nationwide, and in the initial period of his contract, he was busy hiring plenty of candidates for his performance testing team. He would have a pile of CV's (from 3- 20 pages long ) on his desk, and one of the things he used to say was " I look at the length of their contracts. If it's always 3 months here, 3 months there, it either means that the contractor is not up to scratch, or he hops over contracts too frequently. That's not a very good thing, because it introduces a learning curve for the new contractor I replace him with. I would rather want someone who has stayed for longer durations in his previous gigs". Now I do not take this as being written in stone, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes you will have genuine 3 months contracts, but a line of 3 months gigs might raise some eyebrows.

[Antman]

Just completed a year at good old radders (I think a congrats is in order NLUK).

You can be sure that NLUK's seen the post he's probably too busy banging his head against the keyboard and screaming wildly to admit he's wrong!

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

I used to work with a pretty senior contractor at Nationwide, and in the initial period of his contract, he was busy hiring plenty of candidates for his performance testing team. He would have a pile of CV's (from 3- 20 pages long ) on his desk, and one of the things he used to say was " I look at the length of their contracts. If it's always 3 months here, 3 months there, it either means that the contractor is not up to scratch, or he hops over contracts too frequently. That's not a very good thing, because it introduces a learning curve for the new contractor I replace him with. I would rather want someone who has stayed for longer durations in his previous gigs". Now I do not take this as being written in stone, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes you will have genuine 3 months contracts, but a line of 3 months gigs might raise some eyebrows.

I think this is definitely sensible from their perspective. Even in the case when they are looking for "only 3 months" from a contractor, they still want to know that they can depend on him/her should things change.

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

You can be sure that NLUK's seen the post he's probably too busy banging his head against the keyboard and screaming wildly to admit he's wrong!

To be fair to NLUK I had escaped a couple of contracts early....

[TheFaQQer]

I used to work with a pretty senior contractor at Nationwide, and in the initial period of his contract, he was busy hiring plenty of candidates for his performance testing team. He would have a pile of CV's (from 3- 20 pages long ) on his desk, and one of the things he used to say was " I look at the length of their contracts. If it's always 3 months here, 3 months there, it either means that the contractor is not up to scratch, or he hops over contracts too frequently. That's not a very good thing, because it introduces a learning curve for the new contractor I replace him with. I would rather want someone who has stayed for longer durations in his previous gigs". Now I do not take this as being written in stone, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes you will have genuine 3 months contracts, but a line of 3 months gigs might raise some eyebrows.

How long does performance testing take?

[tranceporter]

How long does performance testing take?

Depends on the budget

[TheFaQQer]

Depends on the budget

£50k

[tranceporter]

Lol, what I meant was, just like an any QA, most organizations unfortunately want to focus more on dev, and getting the product out of the door, rather than getting it properly tested first. This particular team was built to test the Faster Payments system that was being built at NW, because the spec was a bit cutting edge, and a payment needed to be completed in 15 seconds end to end. Of course, things went down a different route than intended, and I think I should not divulge any more contractor specific stuff