MCITP?

Ah okay. Will wait for someone's replyy!!!

I'll add to the mix a little. Anybody had any experience with these guys:

http://www.careerjobsuk.com/

They are offering web based training and certification. I've got a web meeting with them a little later today but am not sure of the reputation they have. I'm a little sceptical but will listen to what they have to say.

My problem is that despite a good few years in the industry my last qualification was my degree which whilst a good basis does not directly show or prove my competency. With rates as low as they are at the moment though I'm wondering how if I'll see a return on investment or if I'm better accepting something on a little less money and proving what I can do in the workplace. My last employer would offer training for staff in every field other than IT, for some reason they overlooked us as we were not the core business, despite being totally dependent on us for that to happen.

Fortunately I did a bit of research on Career Jobs UK. I won't say anything as my only experience is with their somewhat dubious advertising, but certainly there are others that report a less then positive experience. As such I've told them where to go. I'd suggest others do some reading before signing up.

As for the shareholder situation v. investment. It's interesting that my two worst experiences of this are both with US based companies. Working for one a few years ago we didn't quite hit the projected profit (although still showing a good year on year growth) so they sacked 13% of the global workforce just before they announced the results. As such the market metric of profit/employees still got their magic ratio and the shareholders got that nice cash.

In my more recent experience it's just been lack of investment. A new product (not bad, just in need of refinement) forced them to class all existing products as legacy. As such no new investment in the existing product set. Now this would not be a problem but 60% of the business ran on the old product and it was still being sold to new clients. I had to fight to get them to officially support 64Bit OS (was blocked by installation script as non tested) then explain that expecting a 15 year old database engine to take full advantage of multi core (single threaded, will not scale) was somewhat optimistic.

My answer to the shareholder issue is that no stock should be held for less than 18 months. It would instantly force a longer view in the markets, remove a high degree of speculation and increase market stability.