Dear Laoshi and Lucky,
I finally got the job offer from another hospital in downtown area yesterday. The pay is higher and the job title is also senior level. It took me nearly three months and I went through 7 on site interviews. I'd like to share some experience with students who are in Canada.
Compare to two years ago I think there are more BI related job opportunities on job market however also more competition. That's just my experience could be wrong. you also need to spend lots of time to modify your resume make it very close to job requirements.
Regarding the on site interviews, I got two sql tests. One was a position in government. Very easy, even didn't have to do table joins only select statement. i didn't get the position though as one reason I think I'm over qualified. this position uses excel a lot to do reporting. Another sql test was with a financial company. The test was not too easy also not too hard either. Used 3 tables to get information and also used group functions. I did test better than two years ago but didn't get the position. The salary company only can afford to pay was much lower than my expectation. Anyway except these two sql tests are technical things, all my interview questions were behavior questions and all of them can be found on these forum:
what kind of manager you like to work with? have you ever had any bad managers? describe what's the good manager or bad manager?
how do you handle conflict with your coworkers or manager or end users?
if end user asked you to create a report using lots of parameters, how do you handle it?
what's your biggest challenge you have ever met at work? how did you act and what's the outcome?
how do you prioritize multi tasks?
if dead line is approaching you think you can not deliver the reports to the end user, what would you do?
why did you apply this position?
what do you know about our organization?
how would your manager and coworkers describe you?
what's your salary expectation?
describe a situation you made a recommendation to improve the system performance.
describe a situation you did trouble shooting fixed the application error.
do you have experience to communicate with cross function departments and senior management?
how do you handle mistakes? what did you learn?
describe how do you gather the requirement from the end users?
I think that's all about my on site interviews. For me, I prepared lots of stories.
Another thing I want to say is Laotu laoshi not only lead me to this data base field but also opened another door for me. Now I can apply jobs not only related to back end but also related to application front end:)
Thanks Laoshi and Lucky and other students.
Jessie