Career Profile of Liam Jones, IT Consultant

How many years have you been in IT?

8

Did you do a degree, if so, which type and where?

BSc Computing

What was your 1^st job in IT?

Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems

Would you recommend grads to travel after college or get work experience first?

Due to the speed that the IT industry moves I’d recommend experience first, there’s plenty of time for career breaks once you become established

Have you worked abroad and if so, where and for how long?

Penang, Malaysia for a month

What was your biggest career break and why?

Getting my first position and Sun Microsystems because it gave me the necessary experience to get my next role (at Hewlett Packard) and things have taken off since then.

Describe your current role in brief.

Developing web software solutions for large financial companies using .NET and SQL Server

Industry:

Finance

Size of company:

Big

Size of team:

10

Report to (title):

Project Manager

Technologies / applications you use:

.NET and SQL Server

Are you currently on Permanent or Contract status.
Contract

Which do you prefer in general and why?

Both have their good points up until this position I’ve been permanent with 4 different companies. With permanent you have security and a better career path, but with contracting you have the opportunity to work on lots of different projects and therefore increase your skills a lot quicker

What trends do you see happening in the next 18 months - 3 years in your specific area of expertise?

The trend is towards better software engineering skills. In the past several years people have lost their way with this, but with .NET it’s becoming more and more important again (which is good!)

What advice would you give to grads / what would you have done differently if you could “reel back the years” career wise?

Never just move for the money, try to get a role you enjoy

What areas of technology would you advise less experienced IT people to focus / get trained up in the coming years?

.NET, design patterns, agile development, object oriented programming

Out of 10, are you happy in your choice of career in IT and if so why?

7 as it’s got me a nice life style, but it’s not something that I can sustain for the rest of my career (my family come first) and it’s quite difficult to move out of IT once your in (unless you have the money!)

What is your favourite top 1-2 technical resource websites ?

http://www.codeproject.com/

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