In the S**t .. retraining required..

[Jaro]

Hi All,

Ive been contracting now for 9 months (on the same contract) but the future aint bright ... well to be fair its B******s

I came to contracting after a period of redundancy (10 months to be exact) when it was pretty evident that my skills where no longer required within the industry. Ive 10 years experience in the industry, but tend to be a jack of all trades and master on none. I worked at my previous company for 8 years working my way up ... but with dated technology such as TCL etc - and doing full cycle work .. so development being just one part of the overall job.

Fortuantley a contract cropped up where they needed a product consultant in the product that I used to help develop .. very niche stuff .. i.e too niche.

So this contract is nearing an end and ive been trying to learn java etc etc .. but what do you folks think I should be spending my time getting to grips with (apart from the ladies ) ?

.NET seems popular etc .. is it worth paying the high fees for training courses - would that benefit.

And with all job adverts (permie jobs) wanting 2years+ experience .. am I simply wasting my time ?

Cheers for your opinions,

Jaro

[TheMonkey]

You could diversify. If you use TCL (Well the Tk side), The Tk bit can be handy with Perl or Python. Not to mention if you develop on UNIX. Your UNIX knowledge is valuable.

It's all about the perception of what you do, not what you do!

I'm a jack of all trades, but I happen to know a lot about C# which pays the bills. My heart is set in python CGI on Mac OS X (which there is precisely ZERO market for).

[Flubster]

Or implement Plan 'B'. You do have a plan 'B', don't you?

[zathras]

NET seems popular etc .. is it worth paying the high fees for training courses - would that benefit.

With some courses being about £2K hows about using the money to buy a decent PC you might find it useful to purchase a PC, some decent books and download the Express Editions of Microsoft .Net.

Use your limited company, become a MS Partner and pay for an Action Subscription for £200K, get all this luvly jubbly software for that to add to the skills.

Until the end of this week you can download the Office 2007 Beta, and the next version of Office development.

Of course your company develops stuff outside of Contracting. Well that's the commercial experience dealt with. Just remember when you sit at a client's desk you look like you know what you are doing!

[darmstadt]

Use your limited company, become a MS Partner and pay for an Action Subscription for £200K, get all this luvly jubbly software for that to add to the skills.

I can buy a whole mainframe for that

[wendigo100]

Use your limited company, become a MS Partner and pay for an Action Subscription for £200K, get all this luvly jubbly software for that to add to the skills.

200K is at least four peerages.

[BlasterBates]

In your position go for the permie jobs... put Java on your CV and then say you developed tools with it, which you used in your projects. They'll give you a techie interview anyway and ask you some questions, if you can answer those and demonstrate knowledge they won't chase too hard on the references. The thing about "lies" is I think what they call "credible deniability" i.e. you need to construct your story so that it can't be refuted, i.e. the tools thing where nobody can say you didn't do it.

It did just occur to me, if you have some mates somewhere on a Java project offer to do something for free, however small even if they don't use it just to get some "credible" reference.