Thursday, September 26, 2002

Rex again: Let me tell you about the job market over here. I am an IT, which as a profession has never struggled to provide work for those who are prepared to spend their whole working lives in front of a PC and deal with arcana and ultra-logical thinking. Previous expats to these hallowed and ancient shores have experienced a shortage of supply and the resulting high wages and wide choices of work.

No longer, it seems. In keeping with Murphy's law, as soon as Phil and I decided to come over here (July 2001), the markets tanked, the .com's unbubbled, and general mayhem ensued. Projects were cut, staff numbers reduced and the demand for IT personnel shrank. In contrast with good 'ol SA, the first world doesn't have a shortage of graduates and any reasonably competant person is not guaranteed a job. So, how does one go about finding work ? Well, I registered with about 10 websites, including a couple of massive, internet-based, job advertisement websites. I applied for everything I thought I could do, but I got nowhere.

A couple of skills that those who are thinking of coming over here should have.
1) Financial services experience. This is a banking city and many jobs are in this sector.
2) Oracle database. I know M$ and Sybase, but oracle is the DB of choice over here.
3) UML (Universal Modelling Language), any architecture position absolutely requires a lot of experience in this. RUP (Rational Unified Process) is also very popular.
4) Java. Java is no longer good enough. Now you need J2EE, EJB, JSP, servlets. Of course, my pigdin java wasn't at the required level.

Let me say that you need to be really aggressive. Don't rely on the email / web forms to get you into the agent's good books. You need to phone them and bug the hell out of them.

Anway, at the end of it all, I got me a job. I am here, doing content management software consulting, which is pretty much what I used to do at Zen. I remember visiting the percussion website and targeting them as possible competition. Then I realised that we weren't in the same league when it came to resources. Funny how things work out.

Let me tell you one thing, though, living in London sure looks different when you are earning pounds and not living off your Rand savings.