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Career advice sought

 
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Hello everyone,

If at all anyone wasted a good career of former days, that would be me. Until 2008 March, I was a solid programmer -- started out in Mainframes but managed to get into JAVA and had a 3 yr experience in it, as of March 2008. Then my ill-formed destiny played a huge role in upsetting me and my ability. I succumbed to some sort of dislike for career and gave up working. Then in 2011, by August, I had an urge to restart career quite passively though, and found job as a JAVA consultant for 6 months. It was unduly challenging - they used iBatis, Maven, Ant, and some other technologies I know nothing about, along with Pentaho ETL. There were rigorous code reviews, constant urge to master UML, participate and contribute in fixing production problems and take care of Pentaho jobs. It was too much for me and my fragile mental make-up at that time. So I gave up job, vouching never to return to workforce again.

This sad phase lasted until 6 months ago. At that time, something happened, and I got a huge, positive motivation to kick-start my lost career. Since then I have been updating my Java skills, and right now, I stand quite solidly as a Programmer again with enough knowledge and confidence to restart career as a SWE with enough HTML, JSP, SERVLET, EJB3.0, JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, XML, DOM, DB2/ORACLE, WEB SERVICES (SOAP, JAX-RS).

But I have had absolutely no response from any employers whatsoever that I have applied to -- I have an old JAVA Sun certification as Programmer and even have that displayed in my resume. But to no avail - no one is interested in my outdated resume with such huge gap in employment.

I have tried applying to Java Support Engineer roles, Technical Support roles, along with Jr. Developer roles -- nope, no one is interested.

Right now, planning on taking OCA, OCP, Certifications on Java from Oracle and then possibly also obtain Web Services and Web component developer certifications too!

If you were in my position, what would you do to restart your career? Please advice. (By the way, I'm female).

Many thanks.
 
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Ravi,
I can think of two approaches here. One is to get rid of the dates from your resume. Some employers will trash your resume. But they are doing that now anyway.

The other is to limit some of the older experience and do something new like making your own website or building some experience with freelance work. The stuff you can get without experience probably doesn't pay well, but it lets you show you did something.
 
Ravi Desigan
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Hi Jeanne,

Thank you for the reply. Can you point me to where I can look for freelance work?

Many thanks.
 
Jeanne Boyarsky
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Ravi Desigan wrote:Thank you for the reply. Can you point me to where I can look for freelance work?


Certainly. This is a common question so we have a wiki page with some common ones listed.
 
Ravi Desigan
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Jeanne,

I did not check the forum for a bit and am posting a late reply. Sorry about that.

I thank you very much for the link. Also many thanks for the reply again.
 
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