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treetrunks

most programmers i know earn between 30 and 40k

mr_bounce

I would get involved with short term contracts. Big companies advertise short term contacts all of the time for programmers yesterday I saw a £450 per day opportunity for a java developer. There is a website called something like find a contractor or find a some thing or other! have a look. Sorry I couldn't be clearer on the web address.

tenpac

Thanks for all the tips guys. I'm based in Nottingham and we use a software language that is only used by the company I work for. It's object oriented but I would need to retrain in other languages. I have done some travelling with my job around europe visiting clients, but I am mainly based in the office, and do development, support, demos and conference calls in the office.

alisonmeyers

i showed this thread to my DH last night as i was on the laptop [STRIKE]browsing forums[/STRIKE] working at the kitchen counter whilst he made dinner, he mentioned IT training too. that's apparently a good racket to be in esp since you just mentioned "development, support, demos and conference calls" - that's good experience even if the nitty gritty details of what your company does is very bespoke.

sort of like a heart surgeon who gets booted out of his heart hospital and realises how many other skills there are to the role rather than the "obvious" one of "well i fix hearts" - which in your case is obviously "i program computers" :rotfl::D (Ok can you tell that I don't have the foggiest idea what heart surgeons, rocket scientists or programmers do on a daily basis, but at least i CAN tell from looking in that there are huge number of skills you have that you need to identify, and see what careers match with)

e.g. if you are doing demos and stuff, do you like the client side? lots of ops in IT sales i'm sure

e.g. if you prefer smaller, known groups, the IT training

what about teaching courses at your local college, or even a local uni? may need further study for this one, i'm assuming you have a degree at least

project management, which i've already said - DH's wages literally tripled in 2 years from making that partial move

or.. are you good at written communication too? what about techical writing? a vague vague family friend writes technical manuals (she's a qualified biologist but works in a chem company on their internal and external written work, or something)

at least in Nottingham you have a huge variety of places that you can go for training/vacancies because you're so centrally located - excellent opportunity!

Idiophreak

tenpac wrote: »

Thanks for all the tips guys. I'm based in Nottingham and we use a software language that is only used by the company I work for. It's object oriented but I would need to retrain in other languages. I have done some travelling with my job around europe visiting clients, but I am mainly based in the office, and do development, support, demos and conference calls in the office.

Sounds like you have "full lifecycle experience" and client-facing soft-skills, so you shouldn't find it too hard to find another job - most programming interviews ask generalised questions about O-O principles etc, but you normally answer in pseudo-code, so it doesn't matter if you're not 100% clued up on whatever language they use.

With your current experience suggests you could look at consultancy as an option rather than straight up dev work - and that can be a nice stepping stone into project management etc.