I work at an ecommerce gateway provider, we do credit card processing, EFT/ACH, payroll, etc. I started out as technical support, and although I'm in the same department (it's a fairly small company, only 20ish people) I'm now dealing with very large clients.
I basically spend my day talking to developers, helping them integrate with our system, fix issues/bugs, go over statements and settlement reports, etc. I've taught myself ASP/vbscript while working here, I've learned CSS/XHTML, and I've re-written all of the sample code we supply to merchants and use in our documentation. I spend a lot of time working with our development team doing QA, helping to decide on new services/features, and so on.
I feel I've grown quite a bit in the 2 years I've been there, and management has shown their appreciation for this with a decent raise last year, a company supplied iphone (with monthly plan included), and so on.
We've grown a lot in the past year, development went from 3 people to 12, and we have a new CTO that is re-structuring everything and creating proper positions. We now have a QA person, we'll soon have someone dedicated to UAT and sanity checks, and he wants to create business analyst and integration specialist positions.
He's talked with me and said he feels I'd be suited to the business analyst position, as opposed to something like QA which I could easily do, but wouldn't really be contributing much new, and wouldn't see a pay raise. He won't be setting this up for a few months, and I'm happy to wait if it's a better fit for me (and gives better opportunities down the road), in the meantime he's recommended getting background on the position and the industry, maybe looking into courses, etc.
My question is this:
I don't have a lot of time out of work (wife + 2 young kids), so I can't handle something like structured classes right now. I've looked at online courses, most seem to have set dates/times which once again I may not be able to keep to.
What's the perception of things like Brainbench and ExpertRating? Both offer "training", and I'm not necessarily looking for a full degree or cert at this time, just basic knowledge to get started. When we've hired developers in the past we've recommended to some applicants to take Brainbench tests and to show us results, but they've done that in the office as part of the interview. What's the real-world view of these types of things?
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Updated as requested
Late last year we had a minor expansion of the company, plus moving to a new office earlier this year (March). With all of this we hired an excellent business analyst, who also has taken on some PM duties.
The company ended up expanding our support department by several people, and converted a small team in another office into support, moving us from like 4-5 people to about 14. With that they created a "lead" position to put me into, along with a decent raise/promotion. I no longer answer calls or generic support emails, and now I'm in charge of training materials, internal tool development (I maintain custom software I wrote for call tracking and statistics), as well as working with large partners and clients on integrations with our platform.
It's the direction I wanted to go, and realistically I'd say it's at the same or just above a BA level at most other companies (as I end up running conference calls that involve BA level people at client companies), internally I'm still not as well trained or experienced as the person we hired (who is seriously fantastic).
Overall things have worked out great, my income is up and I have a lot more freedom within my job, and what I'm contributing to the company is huge compared to just answering calls like before.
I'm considering some .NET courses at some point, to work towards a Microsoft Web Developer cert, as all of our in-house software is ASP/.NET based. If I plan on staying another 5 years or more I'll need that exposure, but I think that's plenty of time to get it in.
I basically spend my day talking to developers, helping them integrate with our system, fix issues/bugs, go over statements and settlement reports, etc. I've taught myself ASP/vbscript while working here, I've learned CSS/XHTML, and I've re-written all of the sample code we supply to merchants and use in our documentation. I spend a lot of time working with our development team doing QA, helping to decide on new services/features, and so on.
I feel I've grown quite a bit in the 2 years I've been there, and management has shown their appreciation for this with a decent raise last year, a company supplied iphone (with monthly plan included), and so on.
We've grown a lot in the past year, development went from 3 people to 12, and we have a new CTO that is re-structuring everything and creating proper positions. We now have a QA person, we'll soon have someone dedicated to UAT and sanity checks, and he wants to create business analyst and integration specialist positions.
He's talked with me and said he feels I'd be suited to the business analyst position, as opposed to something like QA which I could easily do, but wouldn't really be contributing much new, and wouldn't see a pay raise. He won't be setting this up for a few months, and I'm happy to wait if it's a better fit for me (and gives better opportunities down the road), in the meantime he's recommended getting background on the position and the industry, maybe looking into courses, etc.
My question is this:
I don't have a lot of time out of work (wife + 2 young kids), so I can't handle something like structured classes right now. I've looked at online courses, most seem to have set dates/times which once again I may not be able to keep to.
What's the perception of things like Brainbench and ExpertRating? Both offer "training", and I'm not necessarily looking for a full degree or cert at this time, just basic knowledge to get started. When we've hired developers in the past we've recommended to some applicants to take Brainbench tests and to show us results, but they've done that in the office as part of the interview. What's the real-world view of these types of things?
--------------------------
Updated as requested
Late last year we had a minor expansion of the company, plus moving to a new office earlier this year (March). With all of this we hired an excellent business analyst, who also has taken on some PM duties.
The company ended up expanding our support department by several people, and converted a small team in another office into support, moving us from like 4-5 people to about 14. With that they created a "lead" position to put me into, along with a decent raise/promotion. I no longer answer calls or generic support emails, and now I'm in charge of training materials, internal tool development (I maintain custom software I wrote for call tracking and statistics), as well as working with large partners and clients on integrations with our platform.
It's the direction I wanted to go, and realistically I'd say it's at the same or just above a BA level at most other companies (as I end up running conference calls that involve BA level people at client companies), internally I'm still not as well trained or experienced as the person we hired (who is seriously fantastic).
Overall things have worked out great, my income is up and I have a lot more freedom within my job, and what I'm contributing to the company is huge compared to just answering calls like before.
I'm considering some .NET courses at some point, to work towards a Microsoft Web Developer cert, as all of our in-house software is ASP/.NET based. If I plan on staying another 5 years or more I'll need that exposure, but I think that's plenty of time to get it in.
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