Morning all,
This is going to be a slightly long winded post since I am essentially asking for advice on the direction of my life lol.
I am active duty military with 18 years in. My goal is to work in database development with a good amount of programming as well. So while my focus will be on creating databases for applications, I believe having a professional level of comfort and knowledge with at least one programming language will be of benefit. Not only do I think it would help me perform in assigned tasks but I think it will make employers more interested in hiring me.
While in the military I have been trained on a broad spectrum of electronics and electromagnetic spectrum devices, many of which would be largely irrelevant to my chosen field. I also pursued, on my own, a black belt in Six Sigma and lean process management. My educational background so far is 3 associates’ degrees in various fields the military thought would be helpful to them such as human resource management, Aerospace ground maintenance, Avionics systems. I am enrolled in Strayer University pursuing a BS in Computer Information Systems Database Development. Where possible I am going to take programming classes, mostly favoring SQL programming, T-SQL, C# and if I get the chance JAVA. I do have an amateurish yet workable level of experience with VBA. I have also created and administered an Access DB (SQL Enterprise backend) used by the military, roughly 5k unique users a month with an average of 10k new records created in the same timeframe. It is mostly a statistical database and I have run it for 4 years.
I have picked up reading, on my own, the "Yellow book" by Rob Miles and "C# 5.0 in a nutshell". I played around with scripting in Linux but put that to the side to focus on C# for now.
My goal, as mentioned, is to get into database development and be competent enough in Java and C# to create not just the database but also the applications (both web and non-web) to interface with the database.
I would like any and all feedback you guys can give. I have roughly 2 years until I retire from the military and can start my 2nd career. Am I going about this all wrong? What would you experienced guys say I should be looking at as a salary range? I am trying to move to Texas once I get out of the military btw. I have asked the same questions from the programmers viewpoint but I would like it from my fellow DBA/DBDs as well.
This is going to be a slightly long winded post since I am essentially asking for advice on the direction of my life lol.
I am active duty military with 18 years in. My goal is to work in database development with a good amount of programming as well. So while my focus will be on creating databases for applications, I believe having a professional level of comfort and knowledge with at least one programming language will be of benefit. Not only do I think it would help me perform in assigned tasks but I think it will make employers more interested in hiring me.
While in the military I have been trained on a broad spectrum of electronics and electromagnetic spectrum devices, many of which would be largely irrelevant to my chosen field. I also pursued, on my own, a black belt in Six Sigma and lean process management. My educational background so far is 3 associates’ degrees in various fields the military thought would be helpful to them such as human resource management, Aerospace ground maintenance, Avionics systems. I am enrolled in Strayer University pursuing a BS in Computer Information Systems Database Development. Where possible I am going to take programming classes, mostly favoring SQL programming, T-SQL, C# and if I get the chance JAVA. I do have an amateurish yet workable level of experience with VBA. I have also created and administered an Access DB (SQL Enterprise backend) used by the military, roughly 5k unique users a month with an average of 10k new records created in the same timeframe. It is mostly a statistical database and I have run it for 4 years.
I have picked up reading, on my own, the "Yellow book" by Rob Miles and "C# 5.0 in a nutshell". I played around with scripting in Linux but put that to the side to focus on C# for now.
My goal, as mentioned, is to get into database development and be competent enough in Java and C# to create not just the database but also the applications (both web and non-web) to interface with the database.
I would like any and all feedback you guys can give. I have roughly 2 years until I retire from the military and can start my 2nd career. Am I going about this all wrong? What would you experienced guys say I should be looking at as a salary range? I am trying to move to Texas once I get out of the military btw. I have asked the same questions from the programmers viewpoint but I would like it from my fellow DBA/DBDs as well.
