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Hi,
I am a senior Oracle DBA working in a prestigious government department. I have good benefits, a good salary, my job is not so stressful. I have been working for the government for the last nine years before that are used to work for the private sector.
My problem right now is that I want to move back to the private sector, and having worked so long for the government, my skill set now is very core, which means I'm only now able to perform Oracle DBA core functionality, set up and install, upgrade. patch, monitor, back up, performance tuning, space management, capacity planning, all the good stuff that a DBA would do on a day-to-day basis.
When I started looking for career opportunities , I was surprised by how much skills that I am lacking. There are many things that I don’t know because my employer choose not to buy a Certain hardware, certain licenses, did not use any advanced oracle features, chose different choices, and right now I don’t have : ASM, RAC, Exadata, Golden gate, cloud, and of course I don’t have : MySql, NoSql, mangoDB, Hadoop ... etc
So really I’m just a core Oracle only DBA with no bells and whistles, just the basic database support, this is not something that I choose, I’ve just been working at the wrong place for far too long, The Oracle DBA job has evolved and branched so fast and I couldn’t keep up, and without having to work with new technologies on a day-to-day basis, training and reading can never replace hands on experience.
When I apply for new positions in the private sector, I find that I cannot meet the requirements of a straight up DBA job. because now all what I though were advanced oracle features like, ASM, RAC and Golden Gate are now included in the basic oracle DBA skills
Right now I need your advice on how to proceed with my career. should I stay as an Oracle DBA and try to find a place that would hire me as a core DBA and maybe I will learn something new
or
should I just call my DBA career a goner and start something new and what would that new career be if you’re coming from a 20 year Oracle DBA background
Please note that I'm willing and is capable or learning quite a lot in such a short time if given the opportunity, But all companies want to hire a DBA that will hit the ground running !!!
Thank you in advance for all your advice :)
and Connor said...
Definitely not "should I just call my DBA career a goner"... You'd be surprised at how many skills, both technical and non-technical that everyone accumulates just by being in the IT industry.
Obviously it is unfortunate that your skill set is narrower than you would like - if we'd had this conversation 10 years ago I would have advised you. Even if your *workplace* focuses on (say) 3 core areas of the database, you *personally* have a responsbility to explore and branch out beyond that. Its one of the reasons we provide all the software for free for personal use on OTN - to let people do that.
So where to from here ? I never think its too late to start expanding your skill set. That might mean a little bit of humble pie and taking a less senior position in order to pick up new skills, but that's the same for all industries - sometimes you need a lateral move to ultimately make an upward move.
Once strong advisement to you - think about anything you do that could possibly be automated, even if not as good as you could manually, but (say) 80% as good. Anything on that list definitely *will* be automated in the future. So steer clear of those things. For example, 20 years at one place - means you have more *business* knowledge of that company than you probably give yourself credit for. Look at exploit that by offering suggestions and solutions for business improvements.
But keep on skilling up in new areas.
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