"Experience"

Gerry

Shortly I will be coming back from the U.S. , and will be looking for an I.T. job, like all the other graduates. I believe I have experience which puts me ahead of most other graduates, but not very much of it is formal.
I have 7 months industrial work experience in a telecoms software company, which was possibly the best placement that anyone in the class got.
I have also been the systems administrator for the college networking society for 3 years, and have basically been responsible for getting the servers back up and running, and configuring all the services. I have a lot of unix systems admin experience, but only a few months of it was as part of my work experience mentioned above. The rest was in college, and some nixers.
I also have about 8 years experience putting together and upgrading computers for countless people, including maybe 15-20 on these boards. I have less problems writing up this experience, I'm more concerned about the software and sysadmin stuff.

Basically I'm wondering how seriously employers would take this experience, and how best to get this experience across to them. I'm not a green behind the ears graduate, I do have a fair idea of how things work in industry, and I do know how to program and administer servers in a production environment. Thats what I want to say, just wondering if anyone has any advice on how to put it. Thanks very much in advance.

BoyScout

I am no expert but I will give this a bash:

I had a similar problem (trying to get work after Uni) but managed it and I feel it is definitely down to how you represent your all your work "experience" in your CV.
At an early stage in your career you use whatever you have got to get your CV looked at. Weather that is the fact that you held a position on a committee for a Uni society (i.e. teaching you responsibility and management skills if you were chairman of the debating society for example) OR in your case, experience that it DIRECTLY related to the line of work you are trying to enter (*BONUS*).

Without doubt, if an employer is looking for a grad to fill a position, they are going to look for those who have done extra curricular stuff in the line of their work.
So if you are looking for a sys admin position the fact that you have 3 years experience is very good.
You need to demonstrate that the college networking society was a serious society with many demanding users. It may be that the student users just wanted to use the machines you administered for IRC or surfing the web etc but that does not change the fact that you kept the systems available and well maintained for their use. (*don't mention the use if it was just computer users messing about - but I am sure you could state the fact that the users required the systems to be available for them to work on work assignments and meet academic deadlines *). Just word it formally and that will help.

Something like:
1999 - 2002 XXX Uni computer users society - System Administrator
XXX Uni computer society had N members. These users required 24 hour access to computing facilities to allow them to complete academic projects meet deadlines. Responsibilities included:
- Administering network of N PC's running on X network with X servers running...
- System back-up and recovery
- UNIX administration of N Sun servers running Solaris 5.7
- ...

Sorry bit of a hack but best attempt with the info available.

Hope that helps a bit. Might prompt some posts form someone else who has done this more recently. /*hmmmmm I do make myself sound old – I’m not really

Gerry

Thanks for the suggestion, I will reword that section. I'll post up my cv as soon as I can.