Tims+Story

=Tim's Story=

//from the NSW IT Teachers email list December 2005// //Tim is an IT teacher// in NSW.

I have asked one of my students to comment on his last 12 months since leaving school. He elected to work for 12 months to make enough money to travel overseas.

All his employment has been at the local university.



To begin with, having a knowledge of PHP/MySQL helped me to get my first few jobs in my attempt to become eligable for youth allowance. Without that prior experience, I doubt I would have found a job so quickly, or been employed for so long.

To begin with, I was given the task of redesigning xxxx's website which was sorely in need of rebuilding. If I had the chance to do it again, I would do a few things differently, but it turned out alright. I was employed there on a casual basis, but one of the scientists there had a project which, after seeing the new website, approached me to see whether I could do the types of things he was after. If I hadn't had any experience with PHP/MySQL I would have had to turn down the offer as the project was mainly databasing work. That said, I was employed for a further 5 months on full and part time contracts building the backbone of a system that would eventually replace a wide range of other programs currently written in fortran. I should point out that I didn't use MySQL for the background database, but PostgreSQL instead...however the PHP queries and SQL commands are almost exactly the same, so it was no trouble changing to a different program.

During my part time employment in the later end of the 5 month contract, I was also approached by xxxx who were looking for a casual back-end web designer...a lot of the businesses that they were hosting websites for wanted forums and other dynamic elements in their pages, which the current designers didn't know how to do, and didn't have the time to learn. I didn't use a lot of PHP or MySQL during that contract, but the experience in working with web software at a higher level than simply HTML definitely made my job easier (and knowing PHP/MySQL got me the job in the first place).



I hope to have some other stories in the near future.

Regards

Tim