Advice on what to study to suit career shift

[superbole]

Hello Everyone

I am wanting to make a career shift, and need some guidance as to what to be studying.

I am currently a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analyst. In my work I have needed to write several scripts in VBA for use in MS Access or ArcView. Writing these scripts has shown me that I want to be programming and not working as a GIS Analyst or Database administrator.

What do you suggest I start learning to make such a career shift? C#? VB? MCAD? MCSD?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Sheldon

[bartonc]

Hello Everyone

I am wanting to make a career shift, and need some guidance as to what to be studying.

I am currently a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analyst. In my work I have needed to write several scripts in VBA for use in MS Access or ArcView. Writing these scripts has shown me that I want to be programming and not working as a GIS Analyst or Database administrator.

What do you suggest I start learning to make such a career shift? C#? VB? MCAD? MCSD?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Sheldon

I'm required to ask you not to leave Python off your list. Python is a language that can get you on track in OOP quickly for a very low frustration factor. The big tools like Eclips now have Python support and Python is powerful enough to develop full application in. There - I got my quota in.

[DeMan]

Furthermore, while certain languages can be an advantage to progress your career in different directions, the most important thing (IMHO -natch) is to have a solid understanding of Data types, Paradigms and algorithms. Most employers I have met (and certainly in terms of "entry level" positions), are more interested that you understand what programming is and how to program, than whether you can hack something together. This means, provided your studies use a similar type of program (let's face it a prolog or lisp expert may not be so good on functional languages), most employers are not too careful about which one - and nor should they be -> if you understand what a linked list is and how one is implemented, linguistic detail is minor and can be learnt in less than a day.

In my neck of the woods, c# & J2EE are the two biggies in terms of employment at the moment, but even most (or at least many) of them are willing to take on people with "proven experience in any Software Engineering role"

[Amanda5]

Indeed, making a career in any field is not easy at all and takes a lot of time and dedication. I always wanted to become a nurse and now I'm doing my best to reach my goal, which I will be proud of. Much helped the courses from this site hashtagnursing.com and I can even recommend them with confidence. Generally speaking, being a nurse is not easy and such a job requires values such as patience, kindness, qualification in the field, and more. Without these would not get a beautiful result.