Re: Career Change

Tom

I too made the career switch three years ago and have rapidly been promoted through the ranks to Senior Oracle Developer. This is in the UK, however, but the principle is the same. The way I did this was to take an "apprenticeship" with a specialist training provider. Basically, the apprenticeship was 6 weeks of intensive paid-up-front Oracle training (SQL, PL/SQL, the Oracle database) followed by four months of REAL project development work. The latter part of this was the key to its success. I'm sure that in the US the same adage goes that if you don't have the experience you can't get the jobs and you can't get the experience because you can't get the jobs. So this covered it. I would say that a training-only course (usually last about a week per subject) will teach you nothing about development but lots about syntax. It's the former that's important - there's no point in understanding syntax if you don't know how, or more importantly, when to use it. Only experience of real systems can teach you this. It is my understanding that the US is far more career-switch-friendly than the UK, so hopefully you'll be able to break in with exposure to the right training. You can complement any training you do with a database at home (download personal oracle 8.1.7 for your PC from otn.oracle.com) to really mess around with.

There are plenty of VB-Oracle jobs out there, so use your VB experience to your advantage (i.e. don't go for DBA jobs when you already have some of the capability of a "Front-End" developer.) You will need to learn much more about how to interface front-end forms such as VB with the database at the back-end - this is a science in itself. It is also very different from the work I do as a "database developer" - i.e. no front-end work at all - which requires a completely different understanding and use of the database.

So go find your training, preferably one with some real experience built-in, play at home, and good luck !

Let us know how you get on.

Regards

Adrian Received on Thu Feb 14 2002 - 02:42:25 CST