How would you express this desire in a job to an interviewer

[Z064life]

Hi,


I had an internal interview recently, and was wondering, how best would you ask this (I was going to ask this, but I left it out)?


While a job is revolving around x IT technology (i.e. Oracle/SQL Server/etc), the company also maintains a number of systems related to this to support this (e.g. Active Directory/Windows Server for SQL Server deployments).


So if you go for a job primarily for SQL Server (or replace that with any sysadmin/IT pro tech), but you'd like to spread yourself and pick up related techs to keep yourself current, how would you express this desire to the interviewer in a non-cocky way?


You could either state this or ask if this "career progression" exists.


The problems I foresee is:

1) The interviewer may think you should focus on the immediate role/tech first
2) You are assuming you'd pass probation


With 2), the employer may think you are over confident or just confident(bad and good, respectively) and with 1), the interviewer may think you are trying to run before you can walk by not focusing on the immediate issues/techs.


This is really a career development element you'd like, but you don't want to come off as just trying to pick up everything asap in a role.



Any guidance much appreciated!

[GrumpyTwig]

You've not mentioned what your work history has been, which I think is possibly important. If you're fairly new into the sector it's probably not unusual to want to keep your long term options open.

But the best thing is to just talk about potential for career progression within the company, try not to dive in straight to a specific area.
It's not unusual to branch out in a hosting/server environment as lots of things overlap in different areas though in big companies you don't really get jack of all trades roles that much it seems.

[Gargamel]

I think it is fair to assume you would pass probabtion, given the alternative is likely to mean you are effectively presenting yourself as someone whom they will get shot of in three months....

I would turn this the other way round.

When you get to the "Do you have any questions for us"

In my previous role, one of the problems the organisation had was that whilst they had great specialists looking after individual packages, they didn't have people who they could promote to oversee a range of packages or business systems. I have tried so far in my career to build a wider skill set so I am at least familiar with a number of different systems. Is this something that it achieveable in this environment?

Certainly worth a try.

[FunkyNige]

Gargamel said:

In my previous role, one of the problems the organisation had was that whilst they had great specialists looking after individual packages, they didn't have people who they could promote to oversee a range of packages or business systems. I have tried so far in my career to build a wider skill set so I am at least familiar with a number of different systems. Is this something that it achieveable in this environment?

I've said something similar in my past few interviews - it was always in the 'Do you have any questions for us?' bit where I said "in my current position of x I currently also do y and z, is there any scope to do something similar here?". Depending on the size of the business their replies were "as we're a small team you'd also be expected to do stuff outside the usual remit of x" or "we're a large team so have specialists to do that sort of thing".
No-one seemed bothered with me asking about the extra stuff.