IT services societies encourage you to work in any project, no matter the technology, but they recruit people with a certain profile/expertise. You usually work in industrial projects that use ancient technologies. How are you supposed to reinforce your competences?
And here are the answers i received to my dilema:
A1: Technical Recruiter
Encouraged is and should not be synonymous to forced. At least not in a normal company. Realistically speaking, “technology flexibility” is sometimes misunderstood, or used as an excuse for “Let’s accept anything we can get our hands on, but let’s not employ specialists. We can manage with what we already have and still keep low operational costs”.
I have been recruiting IT specialists for almost 4 years now and I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of people that were specialized in one main technology (and it’s associated technologies).
So, if your employer makes you change technologies more often than you change your socks, you should seriously think about changing your job. It’s not possible, for anyone, to do everything right. You should choose a path, and try to stick to it.A recruiter will surely ”buy” your profile if you prove to be/have:
- Stable. Not changing your job every year or so helps a lot.
- Certified. Depending on your field of expertise, there is surely some certification you could get – ex: Sun Java Certifications, Microsoft Certifications, etc. As your skills progress, you should get the certification that is correspondent to your level. For example, for Sun Java Certifications, you would have: SCJA -> SCJP -> SCJD / SCWCD / SCDBC / SCDJWS / SCMAD -> SCEA.
- Relevant experience and portfolio. Depending on the recruiting project in question, a recruiter will try to find people that have been working on similar projects, clients, types of industries, etc., and have the experience necessary to do the required job.
- Undertaken the normal steps in your career positions. It’s important for a recruiter to see that you have been a Junior Developer, Developer and then Senior Developer prior to being a Team Leader.
- Specific about your contribution towards the projects you were involved in. Don’t be lazy, write a couple of sentences about what you’ve worked on, what were your responsibilities, etc. Of course, be honest about all of those. It will help you a lot, considering that a good recruiter will appreciate the information and will be able to advertise you better when presenting your profile to the employer.
- Good recommendations. Always helps to be recommended by prior colleagues, employers, clients, etc. For obvious reasons.Do all of those, try to be a good professional, be realistic and you shouldn’t have any problem in getting the job you want.
A2 : Senior Developer
One of the interesting area’s of application development is the topic of design patterns. Patterns to solve coding issues which have been proven effective. Specifically in the area of object oriented programming and client server programming patterns are extremely useful.
If you are able to learn patterns, and you can show that you are able to apply these pattern in the languages you mention any recruiter you have a very good story about your expertise.
Programming languages differ, patterns do not and are a stable starting point. Good luck !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_%28computer_science%29
A3 : Technical Manager
Consider vendor neutral industry recognized certifications such as those offered through CompTIA. Whether it is A+, Network+, Security+ or some other certification, they all were developed through contributions from IT industry leading companies with the intent of establishing baseline or benchmark knowledge that could be built upon with vendor specific training.
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