Professional Development

A reader left an interesting comment on one of my posts: “Can anyone please give me some suggestion? I am just graduated in IS/IT and don’t have work experience in IT field at all. I am thinking to get Oracle DBA training. Do you think having training will give more likelihood of getting a junior…

Why do some interviewers insist on asking ridiculously impossible questions when they’re interviewing the most junior candidates? I explain why you should use questions people can actually answer, and quit trying to hit the lotto.

If you’re hiring someone who will be storing data in a database, here’s how to find out if they know what they’re doing. Includes questions like, “Explain referential integrity and where it can be enforced,” and “What’s the fastest way to get a thousand records into the database?”

There are 3 kinds of candidates for any IT job: The Junior Candidate – someone who’s not quite qualified yet because they haven’t actually done the work you want yet. The Perfectly Qualified Candidate – the person who’s done the tasks you’re hiring them for. The Senior Candidate – someone who’s done everything in this…

I’ve been working from home off and on since around 2000 for a few different companies.  I’ve been lucky: it’s worked really well for me, but I’ve seen several cases where it didn’t work so well for others, and they lost their jobs.  This week, I’m running a series of posts about the ups and…

In the final part of my three-part series on how to get a junior DBA job (Part 1), it’s time to talk about mentoring and training, and how they affect your salary. Ask About Mentoring and Training During the interview, ask how many other database administrators are on the team and what their seniority levels…

Yesterday I talked about why companies aren’t hiring junior DBAs, and today I’ll talk about how you can get in the door anyway. Companies are Cheap, and DBAs are Expensive Even in a healthy economy, companies want to get a bargain.  They want to hire an experienced senior database administrator for junior DBA wages.  They…

So you’re hearing all the fun that DBAs are having on Twitter and around the intertubez, and you’re wondering how to get in on the fun.  Maybe you’re a developer or a network admin, and you’ve been learning about SQL Server from books and from peers, and you’re starting to look around for your first…

Wondering whether or not you should get certified on something? Experience is cake, certifications are the icing. It’s hard to sell icing without cake.  Yes, there are some people who like to eat icing by itself, but frankly, those people are freaks.  They’re not healthy.  Something is wrong with them. If you take an easy-to-get…