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 How do you develop a career focus after your last employer held the reigns for so long? After a layoff, I contemplated that for a while considering a handful of directions, but barrier of cost and limited/lack access to training made gaining enough practical experience for career advancement pretty much impossible.
At first i considered an A+ certification, but considered it a step backwards since I had worked on a help desk for so long. I did do a significant amount of work with databases in the past, I figured that pursing a career as a DBA would be a natural progression, but oh how I ran into roadblocks!
The main problems I ran into here were which platforms did I want to learn? Which are the best depends on the IT professional you ask. Some say Oracle, since its the most used DBMS used in the world, mostly by academic institutions, government and scientific organizations. Others say Microsoft's SQL Server since many Small to Medium Businesses use it (install cost is much lower than that of Oracle). Yes, they are dozens of other DBMS in use by a variety of organizations, but if you’re not in an environment where it's used often and/or you’re not in a situation where an employer will pay for training, you’re not going to gain much, if any practical work experience.
I was able to get my former employer to pay for an intro and intermediate courses in Oracle, but this only covered commands and how to do simple manipulations with data. Once my studies were wrapped I was not working with Oracle day in and day out. At best it was one more tool to add to my resume. What is it that they say? Use it or loose it? And face it, no contracting firm is interested in bringing on someone whom they feel has entry level experience with DBMSs.
The final turn off to learning these enterprise level DBMSs was the cost. I did some research into becoming an Oracle Certified Professional (their entry level certification).The price? $3000 for the classes, not including the actual test. MSSQL, the prices aren't much better. The message was clear. Without an employer to subsidize the cost of training (or winning the lottery), these were not an option for me. Besides, there was no guarantee that you would end up in a shop that used the same vendor technologies you trained on.
So, after a year of spinning my wheels as to where to develop a career focus, I was able to find funding for training through the WIA program (If you are looking for retraining assistance, I highly suggest that you inquire at your local county career services center). It took a significant amount of research and footwork on my part, but if I could find some IT training that was approved for funding, I was going to jump at it.
I decided on a Web Development Certificate Program through Emory University's Center for Life Long Learning. So far, seems to be a perfect fit for me. I have had my own website since 2003 and have been using a Content Management System (CMS) since then. I choose to use Joomla but have worked with a similar one called XOOPS when I was contributing and web-mastering a video game website. When I was trying to get my website to do cool stuff, I was turned onto Open Source Web Development. Plugins and modules (The stuff that does the cool things like Twitter Feeds, Facebook stuff, and other Widgets) are created for with open source tools such as xHTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, MySQL, WAMP(LAMP, MAMP, XAMP), etc.
It hasn't been easy. You think you know stuff and through the course of class you find that there is more to learn. Even with the classes, you don't learn much if your just reading and doing the exercises in the books. You have to go beyond that. The learning happens when your struggling to build an attractive, dynamic, interactive, functioning website (forget the CMSs, crawl before you can run!).
The best part for me is that I have been working with many of these technologies in my spare time. Having Emory's name behind a certificate is a bonus. In addition, all of the technologies I have mentioned are free and most will run on a bare bones system since just about everything is rendered in a browser! You don't even need a web hosting company to begin learning how to develop for the Web. Now I will warn you, Open Source typically means free, but you may not have an 800 number that you can call when you need support, but with Google, forums, and other burgeoning developers, you can pretty much find answers to your questions.
I find myself in a reassuring place now. I have enjoyed working with web technologies for some time now. I've entertaining taking it further by applying for admission to a Master of Science program in Information Technology. Question to contemplate now would be how to turn this into a well paying career.
-ZQ :) |
