Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • No Guarantees

    The keynote for SQL Saturday #52 in Denver, that didn’t go as smoothly as I’d like due to technical difficulties, however I am hoping I got my point across. Here’s what I wanted to say:

    Who does p90x? Body for Life? Some other exercise routine?

    Do you think these programs work? Sure they do. All these programs will work. At least they will work to the extent that you put the effort in to stick to the program. However the exercise is the easy part. It’s the eating program that’s challenging. Changing your eating habits is hard. Very, very hard.

    However I’ve heard a number of investment advisors say in the last few years that the best investment you can make for the future is to get healthy. Costs for health care are growing and you don’t want most of your retirement money used on healthcare, but more importantly, you want to enjoy your life. You don’t want to be stuck in a bed or limited in the places you can go. You want to be able to use the money you do have to travel. You want to see and do things, not sit around your house collecting pill bottles or waiting in doctor’s offices.

    Mr. Randall, one of the organizers of this event, runs regularly and participates in various races around Denver. I run as well, and in fact, I run every day, though I haven’t done any races. I am not sure I want to show up and one and get dusted by Mr. Randall. I might never hear the end of that.

    We both have to work regularly to maintain some level of skill and health for running. I think that having that steady discipline to keep working at running has really helped us. At least I think it has and I hope that it’s paid off with better health. I know I feel better. I’m not here to recommend that you run, but I do think that working to be healthier is a good investment for your future enjoyment of life.

    But there is no guarantee that this work on our health will pay off for us. We could have an accident befall us, or we could still have health issues as we get older. If you remember, Jim Fixx was a runner, and wrote the bestselling book “The Complete Book of Running”. He died of a heart attack during his daily run at the age of 52. An autopsy speculated that he was genetically disposed to heart disease and revealed he had severely blocked arteries.

    I tell you this not to warn you about running, or make it seem that it doesn’t matter what you do, but to tell you there’s no guarantee that your hard work in trying to stay healthy will work. Just like avoiding all exercise means you definitely won’t enjoy your later years. It could go either way. However there is lots of research, and a good amount of anecdotal evidence, that shows people who continue to take care of themselves as they get older are more likely to be healthy and enjoy life more, and have more opportunities to do things as they age.

    All this professional development stuff is the same thing. It requires a bit of a leap of faith that it will work for you. I think it does, and I’d like to think that all the work that you do to build a brand or network with other professionals is an investment. It’s not guaranteed to pay off, but it hedges your bets. It gives you a better chance to succeed, and it should make you more marketable.

    The talk I do on branding is designed to give you some practical ways to market yourself, and showcase the work you do. It should help you stand out from the crowd, and hopefully make it easier for you to get a job

    The easy part of making yourself more attractive to employers is learning the technology. Picking up Reporting Services or C# or something else is something that each of you can with a little time on a regular basis. My fellow cofounder of the SQL Saturday franchise, Andy Warren, says that you can build a good skill in 100 hours in a year. That’s not an unreasonable level of investment, and probably worth the effort for many of you.

    And like my running, it’s the fun part of taking care of your career. You pick a set of skills you need to learn, things that your employer needs or that you want to work on I the next position you take and go for it. You invest a little time, grow your skills, add a line to your resume, and become more like the employee that many managers are looking for.

    The hard part, the equivalent to eating, is the other stuff. It’s working on the other skills. For most of us it’s the networking that’s difficult. We struggle to make new contacts in our field and to keep in touch with them.

    For some of us it might be the verbal communication skills that we need to develop to make a great impression on someone. Presenting yourself in a positive light, especially in an interview, is hard. Most people are nervous, and they don’t spend enough time practicing these skills. And it shows.

    Most of us probably struggle to document our careers. Writing things down, keeping track of our accomplishments, or our failures. Tracking the efforts we’ve made to improve our skills. We usually don’t make a note, and as a result, we often can’t really make the best impression that we might otherwise make if we did. A quick hint, those written communication skills are important. Blogging is an easy way to do this, and it does double duty of tracking your career.

    These soft skills are the things we all have to really work on and, like changing our diet, they typically are the harder skills for us to develop.

    They are also likely to be just as critical in finding that next job as your technical skills. These days it becomes hard to differentiate yourself just on a list of technical skills, or even in an interview. There are always a group of people that will come across with a similar level of talent, skill and experience. That means that you often have to bond, impress, or otherwise stand out in the interview.

    And that’s hard. You might not necessarily develop a strong bond in an hour talk, and often that is all you have to make an impression on the person that will decide if you get the job or not.

    You should do everything that you can do to make a better impression beforehand. That could be through blogging, or networking, or something else. If you find the job that you want, the job that’s a good fit for you, don’t you want to be sure you get the interview and you stand out? You do, and to do that, you want to work on your professional brand to give you every chance you have to succeed.

    There are no guarantees. Whether it’s exercise, investing your money, or managing your career, nothing will guarantee you a payback. Does that mean it’s not worth doing? Not at all. You hope for the best, plan for the worst. And that means you make an effort to invest for the future, working hard for tomorrow.

    But don’t forget to enjoy today while you’re making the effort. Find a hobby, enjoy your significant other, your family, and try to smile every day.

  • The Design Investment

    I ran across a bit of a rant from Don Halloran on the lack of design effort being made in many applications and software. He talks about a lack of consistency in databases, confusing column names and datatypes not used correctly. Don laments that “It seems database design doesn’t get much respect, and I really don’t understand why this is.”

    We all probably have some idea of why systems get built like this: the designer is ignorant, or lazy, or maybe doesn’t pay attention because it’s not part of their job. Any reason could fit, but ultimately it comes down to someone taking on a job without making the investment in their own career.

    If I were putting tile in my own bathroom, I accept a few mistakes, and I might cut some corners. I might be happy to accept a little fumbling around while cutting tile. I would not, however, put up with that if I were paying someone. I would expect a more professional job. If I decided to change careers and lay tile for a living, I’d also expect to make an investment in my own skills to learn how to do a professional job.

    I understand that developers are paid to write code, and that they are more interested in manipulating objects, methods and properties and implementing DR or indexing. If you plan on working with SQL Server, it pays to make the investment in learning how to do it properly. If for not other reason than because you should consider if part of your professional responsibility.

    Steve Jones

  • Hot Skills

    What are the hot skills to work on in 2011? I found this article that gives you a list of some of the things that companies will be looking for according to a survey in Computerworld. It’s a fairly standard list of generic skills that companies are looking for, but it ended with something that I think that people often overlook: business acumen and communication skills.

    How many of us have to work with someone regularly that is not a technologist? How many times do you have to explain something to a business person in a way that is devoid of technical jargon? I would bet that most of us have to do that. However  it seems that too many technology professionals still want business people to better understand what we provide with our computer hardware and software. Instead of us learning more about the business, we want the business to tell us what we should do.

    Building your soft skills, especially  your communication skills, is important, but too often technology professionals give lip service to any effort. We tend to write poorly, we struggle to explain concepts like disaster recovery in a way that those outside of technology can understand.

    I like to write, but I also learned early in my career that there was a huge advantage to being able to express myself clearly to everyone that I had to work with. I talk about this at The Modern Resume, but there really is no substitute for making some type of effort to learn to write better. It’s a great skill that I’m sure will provide benefits in 2011, and every year after.

    Steve Jones

  • People are talking about you

    I was listening to a friend give a presentation on getting a job recently. In the presentation, Chris Shaw, the speaker, mentioned my Modern Resume presentation, which was cool, but he also said something interesting in his talk.

    He said that social networking is huge, and you can choose not to participate, but even if you don’t, people will talk about you.

    I think that’s very true, and I caution people to be aware of what others might be saying about you. You never know when a coworker, a friend, or maybe a no-a-friend-at-all might post something about you. You never know when a particular person asks about you, your job habits, attitude, skills, or something else in their network.

    People will talk about you, and not necessarily online. It might be offline, and the best way that you can help ensure that you are aware of what people say is to be involved in networks. It could be social networks, but maybe you just want to touch base with your own network, trying to keep in regular contact with 10-20 people that could let you know if they hear anything about you.

    You won’t know everything that is said about you, but the more you participate in some type of networking, the more likely you are to hear what is being said publically.