Oracle Career Advice Tips

If you’re further along in your Oracle career and have some decent experience, you should make sure that you’re getting the right treatment from a recruiter, whether you’ve just applied to one or have an existing relationship. As an Oracle consultant with experience, you should expect to receive a threshold standard of both responsiveness and quality standards from a recruiter, in the absence of which it might be a good time to switch to a recruiter who will be more invested in your career.

Recruiters aren’t afraid to leverage the huge pool of Oracle talent in order to find the right professional for a particular Oracle job. If you’re an Oracle star, chances are you’re a head-down type who is more at home with database architecture than active management of your career. However, if you want your career to advance, keep the pressure on your recruiter to deliver both the attention and the job opportunities you deserve.

Want to be an Oracle Certified Professional? Do it for the long-term learning, not as a short-term investment in your career. Some recent data indicates that Oracle certifications are not adding as much of a premium to consultant salaries as they used to.

Perhaps the best way to approach the thorny and controversial question of certification for Oracle career success is to put certifications in context as a career tool. Certification is based on tests, and tests can reveal where you need to put in extra work to become a better Oracle consultant. If you go into the certification process with the mindset of wanting to discover your weaknesses and correct them, you can’t go wrong. However, if you don’t care much about learning and are hoping that certification will pad your salary in the short-term, you could be in for a nasty surprise. So, whether or not you choose to certify, think of your career and your attitude to learning first.

Oracle ERP consultants must often be more technically oriented than their counterparts in the SAP ERP consulting world, if only because many Oracle ERP end users are also running Oracle databases and other components of Oracle infrastructure. For example, you may be asked to know SQL scripting and be more into the administrative side of things than an SAP ERP consultant.

For this reason, without changing your primary focus away from the Oracle ERP career track, it’s a good idea to build up adjacent competencies in other Oracle jobs technology. That way, if you’re up for a job in an Oracle shop, you’ll be able to demonstrate that you can add value across platforms and that you understand the extended Oracle environment. Bear in mind that cross-training of this kind should only be undertaken if you have the time, bedrock experience in Oracle ERP, and a technical inclination or background that will allow you to venture deeper into the Oracle stack. If you can do so, recruiters and hiring managers will certainly appreciate it.

Oracle has spent the better part of the 2000s acquiring a slew of enterprise apps companies. As a result, Oracle’s ERP offerings are, from the technology point of view, pretty crowded, with legacy apps from Oracle intermingling with functionality picked up from PeopleSoft ERP and Siebel CRM, for example. In most cases, Oracle acquires companies whose products already have a large and loyal installed base, but Oracle also wants to present a united technology front to the marketplace. As a result, Oracle’s roadmap has sunset provisions for providing support to certain kinds of acquired ERP modules and products.

For you, the ERP consultant, this means that your Oracle module of choice may or may not have a future. For this reason, if you haven’t done so already, it’s imperative that you understand Oracle’s product roadmap and learn where your module of choice fits in, as it could determine your career trajectory.

Building an Oracle ERP career, or getting started in one, involves building your social capital. Along this journey, you’ll need the help of expert advisers, such as recruiters, but you'll also need an entrepreneurial, gregarious mentality. To that end, check out the growing number of Oracle Web 2.0 opportunities that will let you get closer to other Oracle ERP consultants, build a circle of trust and collaboration, and even learn what hiring managers and end users are looking for.

A great starting point on this journey is to track down your areas of interest. Unlike SAP SDN, a lot of Oracle’s forums are segmented by interest and/or product line, so be prepared to do some digging. If you want an independent Oracle social networking group, try Oracle Community, which is developing a strong niche in foreign Oracle ERP jobs. Balancing Oracle’s resources with independent resources will give you broad information on the marketplace, allowing you to set your career sights accordingly.

Oracle ERP has a lot of customers in North America. The next growth frontier is the world, with Europe, Asia, and the Middle East in particular representing unfolding Oracle ERP activities. If you’re an Oracle ERP consultant based in North America, the prospect of traveling that far afield may not appeal to you, and that’s understandable. However, both recruiters and an Oracle job board will tell you that there’s more global action in Oracle ERP than ever before.

In this environment, the adventurous and enterprise Oracle ERP consultants will see their careers prosper, while those who insist on narrow geographic horizons may make little headway. If you’re working with recruiters, ask them about their international connections and perspectives on the market, as some recruiters have more of a lifeline to international jobs than others. If you’re an independent and prepared to tolerate risk, start cruising the international job boards and getting your resume out there.

Development or administration? PeopleSoft ERP jobs or Siebel CRM jobs? 10g or 11g? Oracle has the most comprehensive set of technology of any vendor out there. Whether you’re an Oracle ERP consultant or whether you’re active in databases and/or application infrastructure, the Oracle career challenge comes down to picking the right track. With so many Oracle offerings on the market, the risk to you is that your niche can get diluted by other Oracle products and platforms; this risk also exists with SAP, but with Oracle’s massive portfolio, it gets magnified.

It’s hard for an ERP consultant lacking a larger insight into the marketplace to decide how to position himself or herself for long-term product viability. Work closely with a recruiter to gauge demand for the Oracle products in which you specialize, put a lot of effort into deciding where to polish your skills, and be aware that new product releases and M&A activity can preempt you!

One way to step up your Oracle ERP career is to write an article for publication in either Oracle Magazine or on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). If you’re an Oracle ERP consultant with a strong technical background, or someone who entered the ERP track from the database world, OTN is a perfect outlet to show off your technical knowledge, which can be a plus for Oracle ERP consultants. OTN pays for articles, and your name will be before a large audience, so this is an excellent way of bolstering your career and getting more Oracle jobs. Have a look at the archived articles to see examples of recently published articles on OTN.

Getting published in either outlet is not easy, but if you can do so, you’ll definitely have taken the next step in your Oracle career. Learn more about submitting an article to OTN and Oracle Magazine submissions guidelines.

The majority of Oracle consultants gets placed into Oracle contract jobs through recruiters so, unless you are a very skilled and experienced independent or have inside connections with hiring managers, don’t try to buck the trend. Take the time to identify the leading recruiters in the market, and try to join one of them based on your skill profile and the recruiter’s own technical and industry strengths.

Be aware that this is still a reference-driven business and, if you know working Oracle consultants, ask them to recommend you to a recruiter, or at least ask for tips about what would make you more valuable to a recruiter. It’s easier to establish a good working relationship with another consultant than trying to storm the recruiting castle on your own, especially if you lack experience. Get in where you fit in, and if you impress the right people, you’ll eventually get your shot at being signed up by a recruiter.

As everyone knows, Oracle is a monster database company that added application infrastructure and eventually, applications, themselves. Now, after the Sun acquisition, Oracle has a play in hardware as well. There are Oracle jobs in every niche of IT.

Without passing any value judgments on the strength of Oracle ERP offerings or the company’s business model, it is still worth asking yourself which part of Oracle’s portfolio is the strongest, from your particular career perspective. There are some DBAs and other technical types who want to get into Oracle ERP, or are there already, but might have better job prospects back in the database side, because of Oracle’s market dominance there. The point is that, unless your training and experience puts you squarely in Oracle ERP, you should at least think about whether you might have a better long-term future in another of Oracle’s focus areas.