I must admit I was close to losing it but then I bet they all talk to each other and then its gonna be even harder.

As to certs I have some but I am doing more

Thats very true, I have lost my temper with 2 of the big agencies in the UK and my usual weekly phone calls from various people slowly stopped coming in.

One of them, tried to take me to court, I took on a contract that wasnt anything like described and walked out. They tried to make me pay £3k for training, that I never got or needed and damages. My solicitor wrote them a letter asking them for proof and we never heard from them again.

So your right its worth bitin your lip and just getting on with it.

I feel for you as I went through exactly that when I came here first in '02.
Although I had about 10 years solid experience in network manager/network administrator roles, I got hammered with the 'but you have never worked in Australia before' line.

It took me a couple of months to find a job and I took a systems engineer role which involved shocking hours and bad pay. It did motivate me over the next year to study for the certifications which I had not bothered to sit in the previous decade (even though I had the knowledge) as it had never been an issue in Ireland.
Once I picked up my CCNP/CCSA/MCSE in the first year, I quit that awful job and had no problem getting a good role after that.
My experience was that unlike Ireland, where the focus was on results rather than having local experience/certifications, Australia was very certifications focused when I was looking for my first job. Once I had a years local experience under my belt and I had picked those certs up (which simply validated my skills), it made an amazing difference.

I am in Melbourne, but I know it is a little tougher for IT work in Brisbane.

Stick with it - it will get better !

2002 was pretty crap for IT jobs. I got a contract role then through contacts and was made permanent at that company. An agent put it to me that in an employers market that certs can distinguish two equally qualified techos.

Unfortunately, given all of the recent layoffs I have seen here in Melbourne in IT and the shutdown of so many projects that were in the pipeline, I think 2009 is shaping up be similar to the crap year I first encountered in 2002.

9 year old girl becomes microsoft certified proffesional

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/12/9_...ssional-2.html


No wonder all the jobs go to india !!

I was always told the only difference between contract & permanent is 2 weeks extra notice.

On paper yes, but in practice, when it comes to cost cutting time in large corporates, not renewing contract staff is a much, much simpler task for HR than retrenching a permanent employee ;-)

There's another difference: an employee needs to be in work for the whole year to earn a year's wage but a contractor doesn't.

It's easy to proclaim that contractors are first to be let go, and there may be some truth to this in some circumstances, but the reality is that in these times, when big banks and the like are announcing redundancies in the thousands, there's no real security however you are employed.

As a contractor, I've outsurvived lots of employees at some of the places I've worked but I've also been let go myself. If you are very good at what you do, you can do very well at contracting.

- CDM

True, very true. I never intended the point to be any way related to job security though. That concept absolutely went out the window with our parents generation

You are over qualified, thats why as well. Lets face it we all say we are happy to take a less job with lesser pay because we need a job, but then only stay until we find the one we wanted. They know this and know there is no point in employing someone unlikely to stay.

Jo

No offence to this girl, or any MCPs - I am one myself - but the certifications aren't really worth the paper they're written on. I sat an exam where the questions are the same every time and can be downloaded from various 'practice sites' or as bit torrents. That one exam earned me an MCTS.

At my site, a well-known Australian bank, the last retrenchment was of 50% of the permanent staff on the project (~20). Two contractors were not extended and all remaining contractors are now on 1 month renewal cycles.

Give us the link then

In the certificate obsessed world that is Australia having some more letters after your name is always handy.

In an ideal world yes. A doctor is a doctor. He can move to the other side of the world and get working the next day. IT should be the same but employers and agencies don't think so. When they want someone to do some VB programming they immediately exclude all applicants who have no VB experience. They would do this even if the remaining applicants had only 3 months of that skill. By doing this they exclude applicants who have 10, 15 or 20 years in IT and have probably been there, seen it and done it. But just because they don't have VB they get excluded. Employers and agencies need to take a step back and think hard. There are IT professionals out there with the experience to take on new projects and pick up new skills quickly - "it's logical Captain". IT just needs a methodical mind with an ability to get into nested statements without losing it. Maybe we should refrain from using statements like "I want a job in IT" because all that does is generalise your skills in a world where general skills don't count.