You are a fully fledged professional computer programmer. You have done paid work in the past either as a permanent (or contract staff) member of a team working in the corporate world, or by being commissioned to do a specific task as a freelance computer programmer. Having been out of work for some time you now wish to secure paid employment. If this is your brief then I hope to show you how to take the required steps to achieve your objective.
For the purpose of illustration let us follow the activities of an imaginary computer programmer who we shall call Jill. We shall follow her step by step process of general preparation which we define as the process of preparing the material required for presenting during her forthcoming interviews.
Jill had successfully held down computer programming jobs in the financial sector in the past but had to take some time out after giving birth to her second child. It had been over two years since Jill had worked as a programmer and hence she did feel a bit out of it so what did she do?
As a former professional Jill was already quite adept at using the Internet for the purpose of researching issues surrounding her job. So the first step she took was to do some preliminary research on the state of play of Java in the current market. Java had always been her main area of expertise although she could still remember how to do basic C++ programming.
From her research which involved the use of recruitment search engines like Jobserve she convinced herself that the financial sector was still the most lucrative sector to be in as a software developer.
Next she further experimented with the Jobserve search engine to determine which java technical skills were currently in high demand in the financial sector. For example, in her previous jobs she did not have the need to use multithreading extensively as a Java developer. This time she determined to incorporate a deep study of multithreading into her general preparation for her prospective interviews.
Finally she had to admit to herself that she was a bit rusty having not interviewed for some time. As she was already an experienced professional who had successfully scaled through several interviews in the past, she decided to take a short cut and brush up by attending a couple of real interviews.
Let's analyse exactly what Jill did here. First she did some preliminary research. She did not jump straight into the process of general preparation for the interview process. Before beginning to prepare she made a careful study of exactly what she was going to prepare. She stepped back from the problem to gain a better overview.
Having completed her preliminary research she approached the problem of general preparation from three angles: technical knowledge, business knowledge and finally interview preparation.
From the technical perspective her game plan would be to deepen her knowledge of multithreading within the Java space.
From the business perspective as she had decided to focus on the financial sector she would brush up on her previous knowledge (as she had worked in this sector before) and then narrow down her focus for specific interviews as they became available.
As for interview preparation, being a past veteran enabled her to jump straight in and brush up by attending interviews for those roles where she did not particularly mind if an offer was not forthcoming.
Philip Ade is a professional computer programmer and has been working with a variety of computer programming languages in a variety of industries for over 20 years.
To find out more about how to get started as a professional computer programmer please visit http://www.software-development-success.com
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