Where To Steer My Career?

um7y1h83ge06nx

Hi guys,

I need some advice. Firstly I'll throw out all the vital stats!

- graduated in 2005 with a 1.1 in Comp Eng.
- Have a EIQA certified Diploma in Quality Management (Distinction)
- 5.5 years or Development experience with 2 companies.

- Main Tech: Java Enterprise, Adobe Flex, C, C++, VB, PHP and Assembler (for certain embedded stuff). Java Enterprise and Flex these days mainly though.

- Bells and whistles - Experience with Oracle and IBM DB2. Spring, iBatis, SpringFlex, Hibernate, jBPM etc.


Anyway, I'm getting a little itchy about my current job. Good experience but I'm not sure I like where things are going. There is too much focus on getting stuff out the door (focusing on the now), rather than looking for new opportunities. I know we're in a recession but if we don't move forward, eventually it will come back and bite us. This unrelenting pressure on getting stuff out the door has really impacted teamwork and the great atmosphere that was once here has been eroded in recent times. I've been here since late 2007.

Also, the work is getting a little stale too, I really wish I could get involved in new stuff.

My salary is almost €44K. I'm genuinely not sure if that is good or not with my skill set and experience. I think it's pretty good though.

So I'm wondering should I look around for new opportunities? Is my skillset decent and what could I do to improve it? What are the salary expectations?

Thanks for reading.

km991148

not sure about advice - but your post seems quite specific... would you want others (employers!!) reading this - could they identify you? Experience probably more relevant than degree for this type of advice..

um7y1h83ge06nx

Yeah true. I removed a few little pieces there to make it a little less specific.

Thanks.

um7y1h83ge06nx

Anyone have any opinions at all?

krazyklown

I cant comment on your skills or experience but I am in the middle of changing jobs from a stable, unpressurised, close to home, safe job to bottom of the ladder, starting from scratch in an expensive area because i ultimately feel unfulfilled in what i am doing and feel I have no future.
Its taken me a long time to confront myself and make a decision as to what I wanted for my future, but having done it I feel liberated in that I am taking charge of what I am doing.

If you arent happy take a long hard look at why. Maybe your employer is waiting for you to make some input or take leadership and drive things in the direction you think they could go. Or are you searching for reasons to justify to yourself that you arent happy where you are and prehaps should seek alternative employment.

The only advice I personally could offer is ask yourself, if there were nothing constraining you, what would you really want to do?

And for what its worth I had massive doubts regarding whether my skills or experience would be of any interest to potential employers but as it turns out they were invaluable.

um7y1h83ge06nx

Thanks for the reply.

Since I posted here an internal position has become available which is exactly the area I want to get into, so I'm definitely applying for this. I have let my supervisor know I am applying for this role as I feel I have done all I can in my current position that my long-term career goal is to help both the company and I reach our full potential by moving into a more senior position.

I have came to the conclusion that I don't want to get stuck in a rut doing stuff that I hate, so if this application doesn't work out I'm going to apply for any external roles that take my fancy nationwide..

Should be an interesting few months.