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I'd take any job you can get at this point

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and THEN continue to job hunt on the sly. It's much easier to get hired when you already have a job

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Or is there any agency work in your field, or anything remotely near your field so that you have some money coming in and are building up experience?

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Originally posted by Telepath:
The problem is not that I'm inexperienced as such, but that the recruitment process in software development does not recognize transferable skills.

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That tends to be because recruitment is done by agencies who don't understand.

Many, many, years ago I had a similar experience, though luckier than yours because I still had a job. I was thinking of going to contracting which, in those days, paid far more than working for a company. A couple of contractors who worked for us suggested that I apply to their agency. They also recommended meto the agent, saying that I was (in their view) a technical expert in whatever it was (some esoteric bit of mainframe system programming now as obsolete as cahriot driving I expect).

The interview wasn't for a specific job, but just to be on their books for them to try to sell me to their customers. I had two interviews and got turned down because I wasn't skilled enough. In fact no-where near skiled enough. They looked on the interview as more or less of a waste of time and I think they said that to my co-workers who had recommended met. Which surprised them, becuase from their point of view I was the most technically skilled of the lot of them.

I realised that the agency meant soemthing quite different from us by "technical skills".

We meant the ability to do things. Which in the system programming line includes the ability to pick up someone else's software problem and try to fix it even if you haven't ever used that software before.

When the agents said "skillset" (horrible, horrible word) they meant a list of products you had worked with. Ideally a certain number of years using the exact same thing. If not that then a piece of paper from the supplier saying that you had sat through their indocrination and brainwashing course and managed not to criticise the company in the excuse for a test at the end.

(I dislike supplier certification on principle. Too much conflict of interest. I did in fact once do the courses you'd need for an MCSE but never bothered to take the tests because I would rather not have one than have one. But then I had a decent job at the time, which makes it easier to have such principles)

And the reason recruitment agents do this is because they haven't got the slightest idea what they are talking about. If they want someone who can, say, administer an Oracle 10 database on HP Unix, they want someone who has exactly that on their CV. It doesn't matter to them that someone who has used previous versions of Oracle, writes SQL code for a MS SQLserver application, and currently administers an Apache/PHP/MySQL website on Linux, almost certainly has the right skills for the job.

Because they don't know what the words actually mean. To them they are just magic words the customer wrote on a piece of paper. They'd never do anything as icky as actually get involved with programming so they don't really know what they are talking about. And they use vile managementspeak jargon to try to hide that.


In the company I worked for then we has the same problem with recruiting staff through our own company's management. The personell department (or HR or whatever it called itself) had lots of rules and regulations about what qualifications new recruits had to have for particular jobs.

Once we did manage to get somemone they told us we couldn't have, and she was brilliant. They said she didn't have the right experience, but we knew that what she had doen was just as good. They said that she needed a relevant degree or whatever, but we knew that doesn't matter. And they gave her silly personality tests and said that she wasn't a team player or some crap like that. But we felt she would fit in. Which she did.

Sorry, all that was a mild rant.

No real advice to give

Except maybe you have a better cance of getting a fair hearing at a place where the recruiting is done by the people you would be working with, rather than by an agency or by some central HR department.

How you find such places I do not know.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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Originally posted by Evensnog:
The client was seeking an office manager position, with 3+ years experience with Windows Vista.

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Though of course such people will exist, there will be a few hundred of them out of Microsoft. Though I suspect they won't be going for office manager jobs, unless we include software development managers.

I've been there twice myself. (though not used it to get a job). There was an IBM mainframe system called VM/XA, followed by VM/ESA that I worked on before it was released, because my then employers got involve in a pre-release early support program. And I once put my number of years working with Microsoft Exchange on a CV and got taken up for it because if it was true I'd have been using it a year before it came out. Which of course I had - I went on a Microsoft training course for Exchange about six months before it was released. Again, because my employers were fans of getting in early.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.