Moving to Swindon area and looking for work - advice please!

[AndyCowman]

Hi all,

I am moving to the Marlborough / Swindon area shortly and will be looking for work. This post is firstly a shameless plug looking for jobs in that area, and secondly a more serious question about how to sell myself.

I am a graduate who started out working as an MI / BI analyst with strong technical skills in Excel, Access and VBA. From there I have done some training with the professional planning forum before moving into a more technical position. I am now trained and able with Cognos reporting, SQL (primarily Oracle but also MS) and have further developed my MS Office talents and am employed as an MI Developer.

I have also been studying C# and .NET and have successfully completed the advanced course with Learning Tree however since this was quite recent I am still finding my feet with this and so whilst technically I could do it I still lack the experience - my plan is to be honest and say that I am developing these skills. Is that best? I don't want to under sell myself and miss out but equally I do not want to be caught on the back foot and be expected to do more than I could at the outset!!

Any advice on companies, agencies and areas to look for work in are gratefully received.

Many thanks

Andy

[itsnotarace]

I'm in Aldbourne so not a million miles away. I'd be looking at the larger companies if I were you. Vodafone in Newbury, Motorola / WHSmith/ Nationwide Building Society, nPower in Swindon

Otherwise you are going to be commuting towards Bristol/Bath way or back down the M4 to Reading etc

Obviously if you have SC clearance there's plenty of MOD type work in the area

[worsy]

Plus Capita and CSC who service Zurich.

London is an hour by train and that opens up a whole host of possibilities, have you considered contracting? Plenty of big companies in Reading/Basingstoke/Bristol which are all commutable.

[worsy]

http://www.jobserve.co.uk/Business-Intelligence-De...

http://www.jobserve.co.uk/Business-Intelligence-De...

[littlegreenfairy]

itsnotarace said:

I'm in Aldbourne so not a million miles away. I'd be looking at the larger companies if I were you. Vodafone in Newbury, Motorola / WHSmith/ Nationwide Building Society, nPower in Swindon

Otherwise you are going to be commuting towards Bristol/Bath way or back down the M4 to Reading etc

Obviously if you have SC clearance there's plenty of MOD type work in the area

Motorola are quite small now but Nationwide are recruiting quite a bit at the mo.

Welcome to Swindon. It's a bit of a dump but the surrounding areas are just lovely.

[JontyR]

Go and speak to the trading team at RWE, they are often looking for IT staff....worth a shot Great place to work also.

[Gaspode]

If you're well-versed in business intelligence and such, then I would strongly recommend you focus on data warehousing rather than application development, especially if you're good at talking to people and don't mind getting stuck into a bit of business analysis. Brush up on your data analysis and modelling skills. Learn how to build good-looking dashboards, understand how to build efficient dimensional models, maybe get a bit of exposure to technologies like SSIS / SSAS / SSRS.

Guys who can write software are ten a penny, but guys who can get management information to the right people at the right time in the right form are highly sought after.

[AndyCowman]

Hi guys

Thanks for the advice, I will certainly look in to the suggestions and will stick with analysis and MI/BI development rather than just software dev, although out of interest I will carry on learning C#!

My direct boss who I get on well with is asking if I would be prepared to commute - I said yes but would require travel money to ensure I was not worse off and suggested the possibitly of working from home or compressed hours and made sure she knows I wouldn't do it for ever!! Knowing my company I do not expect they will increase my cash so it probably won't come to anything.

Its nice that she wants to hang on to me though!