Proving your Experience

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How did you guys prove to future job employers that you had experience? meaning is it entirely nessesary to have letter from your former boss or manager saying "joe bloggs worked here from such and such to such and such and he did this:" or do people just take your word?

the reason im asking is my boss is reluctant to giving me one!

 

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aint that a b*tch, i know here UK, managers have to give you a reference, and then it has to be a positive one... my last two roles i got the employer to email me the reference, so i can print it out. i also tweaked it slightly but thats our little secret...

 

Yep, the reference is usually the way that it works over here. On the other hand you should be able to give examples of the experience that you have when you are being interviewed, and even before in the covering letter.

 

erm no, as far as I'm aware in the UK, it isn't compulsory for a company to give you a reference.

 

Tweaked it? nice.....

I took a peek at what they say about me by going into their C$ and searched the file and temp files according to file creation date...

 

LOL guys come on! so who wants to write mine for me then?

 

Would you accept one from nugget IT??

 

You cant really prove it unless they test you, otherthan that its something documentated on a piece of paper... thats the only thing i can think off..

 

Here in Switzerland the employer has to give you a reference. They can't write anything bad either and you have the right to refuse it and get another one written if you're not satisfied with it. The employers here seem to take it at face value that what is written there is also (mostly) the truth. It's also in your interest that it's true because the employers also ring the former employers too.


Why won't he write you a reference zimbo? Either he's a prat or he's scared that you're looking for a new job.

 

because he's a prat! they been open for 3 years and im the 1st to last 1 year. but thats how it is in cyprus's job market!

 

To whom it may concern:

Joe Bloggs worked for me for several years, I consider him to be a real lead swinger.

 

It's not compulsory to give you a reference but they are also not allowed to give you a bad reference. They can just refuse to give you a reference and state that to a future employer if they have reason.

 

The last few jobs I've had the new company hasn't checked the reference from the previous company until after the job had been offered. I always put some of my previous managers and colleagues who I worked closely with as references as well because they know my experience first hand.

As far as proving it- technical interview questions can usually suss out if you can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. I always like to give examples of when I've dealt with certain technologies when asked about them, eg:

Q: "How familiar are you with Veritas Backup products?"

A: "I'd say I got to know it fairly well after such and such a time when backups wouldn't run because of blah blah, and after some reading around I found a solution which was to do this that and other to the xyz. Then when I was at company 'A' we were using version x.x.x which did 'this function' in a slightly different way"

Q: "You get in one morning no one else is in yet and a whole department are calling in complaining they can't log in what do you think is the problem?"

A: "This happened quite a lot at Company 'B' when they had old infrastructure than needed upgrading quite badly. If it is a department all in a physical location then I'd have to say it's a physical network problem like a switch or trunk cable, if I had access to the infrastructure I would investigate, failing that I'd call a network admin on their mobile and get them to talk me through troubleshooting over the phone."

A lot of technical experience questions boil down to how you react in certain situations, the type of decisions you make and how aware you are of things like business downtime, how long to spend troubleshooting a problem before escalating.

Hope this helps.