Curri...cu...lum... what ? [Part 2]

Howdy all.

I'll just have a quick look where I was and where I'll continue on for a little while in this post as part two of the riveting (typo no.. you get the idea, these will now follow as the signal [t] for ease of read).

Right, back up to speed.. job search centre, free inet and the likes. It just so happened that neither ourselves of the housemates doing security for a living since ( I think it's been May last year or something) knew about the inet-enabled job search centre about 200 metres from the front door. Luckily the landlord ( on his return to London after going to SA to view the house his wife bought) told me about it, because he was now living next door and the au pair always went to the job centre to check her emails. Great news. ( No really, this was some welcome relief from doing about 12 - 16 pounds per trip [ that's 2 ppl, travel and 4 hrs of inet time in an inet cafe in Oxford (cheapest) ] ).

Would have saved loads if we knew that.. even more if the house was online when we got here..

Anyhoo. So we walked down to the job centre one morning, walk up to the dude there and ask what we need to do / pay to use the facilities... "Ah no mate, no worries, just fill in this form and then sign your name in the log book for firedrill purposes, and there you go.. next time you just sign in and sit down and surf, telephone and faxing services for free as well sir."

Nice dude, bet it helped that they were offering everything for free, but he's a nice enough dude as it is as well :). So there we go.. I started searching.. for both myself and Grieks (blog here,and ya that's what I look like under water, and yes I did the superman stunt thing, I blame Benz.. those who dive, you know what I'm talking about).

The IT market has experienced a bit of a boom lately here, even though some papers say it hasn't. Evidance on the web was at first staggering. Little background if I may : Go to something like ITselect.co.za in SA, type in Web developer, and try and find someone that's looking for anyone other than either PHP (which I don't do yet, cause I don't make time to learn it) or ASP.NET.. there's maybe one or two J2EE stuff, but that's it.. nothing about classic ASP without ASP.NET ( which to my dismay is where I'm at this very minute in my life.. sad I know.. true though), for that matter, try and find more than 10 - 20 jobs in web dev.. righto.. now... little bit of a scope thing here.. go to cwjobs.co.uk and punch in the words Web developer in there.. and select all jobs.. and wait for it.. a whopping amount of posts..loads..

What was naive Zodan thinking when he saw the job count ? .... come on, some of you people actually know this vain boet from Brackenfell.. yup, that's it.. I was thinking this was going to be a cruise mate.. ( I can see Oct sniggering.. piss off :) He knows I love him and I say that in the most affectionate tone imaginable ( just for the sensitive at heart).

The thing that I did not know, and only got to learn last week, through 2 different sources was that there are perhaps 1 in every 1000 recruitment agents that read your CV in this country... 99.9 % of them import your cv directly into a recruitment database and do what.. a word count match between the client's spec list and the whole database, then selecting the top 10 of the cv's that jump up, phone those guys up, ask if they are available and then select 3 CV's to send to the client.

Rest of the world 1, Zodan 0.

It was about to get some mighty more interesting, cause then during the week of being at the job centre we organised that the broadband got hooked up here and was running.. this happened on a Friday.. uhm... interesting. So after making sure everything is stable on the broadband, by doing load testing for some 9 hours overnight ( so what's a few episodes of cars driving around :) I was behind on the series anyway :).

I set off on the Saturday evening on the mission of all mission with my choc chip cookies next to me on the bed to start applying for as many web dev asp jobs I could find. And I found a few.. I think I have about 40 - 50 confirmation of application emails in my inbox.

The call back ratio on Monday.. well atleast it wasn't nothing.. I got two guys phoning me back, one even from a direct company in Soho who wanted me to come in for a SQL test interview. (will get back to that later, other post by the looks of time, and boredom on the nation's eyes from reading all the pages and pages of posting.)

Blimey, my posts seem to be fairly.. long. Think I'll kill this one and move along to tomorrow, before people are kept out of work for to long reading things while suppose to be working :)

[Part 3 to be in the post soon, promise I'll try and get some pics in there somewhere]