Schooling for Entry-Level Oracle Work?

Please pardon me if this is the wrong newsgroup for this posting; I'd thought .marketplace would be right, but judging by current contents, that doesn't seem to make sense.

Anyway. I'm trying to make what amounts to a career change; after *lots* of work in clerical and accounting-clerk positions, I took a course in elementary SQL three years ago and got a perfect score on homework and exams (except for one extra-credit question). So thought maybe this is something I can do. I learnt in college that I'm not *in general* a very good programmer, and therefore want to specialise in databases. Which, anyway, all my data entry work gives me a lot of perspective on.

I moved to Madison shortly after taking that course, partly in hopes that a program described here:

<http://matcmadison.edu/matc/offerings/programs/Ciric2004pdfs/CISOracleDataCert.pdf>

would give me the additional background I think I'd need to do good work. Oops. Couldn't afford the classes; they weren't listed in the schedules anyway; and now the program has apparently been cancelled. (That PDF is not the same as what I'd read in 2002.)

Now I'm about to get an inheritance that can probably pay for two years of school, but probably not for four; can probably pay techcollege  tuition, but not elite-university [1]. And I'm coming up empty when looking for anything comparable to that cancelled program - which was only four courses on DBs anyway!

I've been told that there are no jobs in existence that can be obtained on the basis of a two-year CS program of any kind - that such programs are basically ripoffs, and minimum working papers are brand-new BAs or BSs in CS. Well, OK. I've *seen* jobs that I could do with what I now know [2], so this strikes me as dubious, but if it's true, I guess I'd better pick a different field.

But if it *isn't* true, I'd really like to know whether anyone, anywhere in the US or someplace a USan can go to study, is offering any sort of in-depth program in database work.

Joe Bernstein

[1] I have most of a BA from the University of Chicago, and could, if I wished, spend half the inheritance completing it. I'm reasonably sure it would be much more expensive to try to complete it somewhere else.

[2] I worked in 2000 at an organisation that had DBAs, query specialists, a database help desk, and a general help desk. I could do the database help desk job the day I got out of that class - the person I worked with in that job was herself just taking the class at the time we worked together. The query specialist job, I'd want at least one more class for. Either would be my idea of an entry-level DB job, though the queries job would be tougher; I'm obviously not expecting to be hired as a DBA fresh out of school, nor after the first job.

   But some sort of "assistant to the DBA" job in a small organisation would also work.

   Or a job in an Oracle consulting firm that basically feeds on graduating classes, trading bad working conditions for those crucial first years of experience. It's not clear to me whether I'd rather focus on design or administration anyway.

   I just don't want to land in a *generic* help desk and have to scrabble my way over to database work all by myself.

   Oracle just looks to me like the best bet for work that I'd want to do; I'm open to arguments for other software, though they're probably not best done on the newsgroup...

-- 
Joe Bernstein, writer                                  joe_at_sfbooks.com


<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>