Anyone here a full-time Microsoft Access Developer? (1 Viewer)

[Cosmos75]

I am curious to know if anyone here is a full-time Microsoft Access developer?

I've seen a few postings on dice.com for such people where the only requirement was knowledge and expreience with MS Access.

More often than not the requried skills extend beyond just MS Access:
- UML
- SQL Server
- .NET
- ASP.NET
and so on...

If you are employed/self-employed as a MS Access developer, what other skills do you have that have helped you to further your career.

Thanks!

 

[Road_Warrior]

Yes I am

First be VERY good at access, VBA and SQL. Second get certified SQL Server as this is the criteria most recruiters search for, you can specify Access as your speciality in your res but a certification is crucial to getting attention. Also you need to show in your res your ability, specifically SQL and VBA proficiency. I make 100K plus per year and have 7 years experience so dont let anyone tell you access developer is not possible. Ive also found and this is the caviot, you must be willing to to go where the job is to be full time employed. Have worked for 5 companies in 4 different cities in the last year but only 2 weeks without work. If you want fulltime work in Access for a company in a city (a real job) concentrate on small to midsize companies as larger companies will almost always contract out to headhunters for the duration of the need and not offer perm employment. Also look into govt jobs, youll be suprised at the number of agencies using access. Last tidbit be VERY comfortable with using Oracle, SQL Server, db2 and AS 400 as backends and with ODBC conectivity in general. Also be able to prove the ability to get into and understand various business models and convert to a solution in short order. Heads down I code does not cut it. Companies wawnt you to be able to add value to the business in addition to just giving what is asked.

 

[Bodisathva]

100K / year and misspell caveat?

 

[dolano]

Road Warrior where would recommend for obtaining a SQL server certification. I.E online what are the best sites.

 

[RichMorrison]

I coulda beena contenduh

Cosmos,

I was a full-time Access developer for about 5 years. I was a consultant, BTW.

In addition to skills with Access itself, I think a developer should know how to use other back end DBMS such as Oracle or SQL Server. Personally, I used a bit of Oracle. You don't need to be an expert in another DBMS, but it helps to be able to use one.

You might also want to learn to use Excel and/or MS Word from Access.

As far as UML and .NET, that doesn't seem critical to me. I suppose you might want to use Access from a .NET app and in fact I did. But that's really ADO and not so just .NET

Everything I wrote above assumes you will be writing a lot of VB code within Access apps so I suppose one would add VB to the list of things to know.

Or, just become a java developer where nobody knows what's really going on.

Rich Morrison

 

[jsanders]

100K / year and misspell caveat?

Thank goodness for Bill Gates.

 

[Rich]

Thank goodness for Bill Gates.

Look I hate to mention this but I'm sure repeating yourself is the first sign of madness

 

[jsanders]

If you’re going to go the self employed road, then I think that to most small businesses, the ability to design software to work for the customers is many times more important than whatever certification you may have.


Code writers are a dime a dozen, software engineers are rare and most people that develop databases don’t have a clue. If you can figure out why everyone always complains about their current system; you will be well on your way to blissful database development nirvana.

 

[jsanders]

Look I hate to mention this but I'm sure repeating yourself is the first sign of madness

Nah, just senility.

 

[Road_Warrior]

Amazing, misspell 2 words (you missed one Bodisathva) and get slammed.
You don't care to comment on the content which RichMorrison seems to back up. I know this is the watercooler but if all you can do is grade my spelling and grammer perhaps you would be better off teaching middle school.

 

[Road_Warrior]

As for dolano's question I did not go to school, use sites etc. Got a copy of SQL Server and converted previously developed db's in access to SQL Server without the wizards then built access front ends to access the SQL Server data. Struggled alot but for me that is the best way to learn.

 

[Cosmos75]

Thank you all for your replies so far! Very interesting!