[IT job] NCS Application Consultant
 

Would like to find out more about the job nature of the above from those who have worked in this position/role in NCS before. I believe this is primarily a software development role.

Some specific questions:

• Location: are they stationed at customer's remote offices/sites, or they are primarily at NCS Hub?
• Weekday Overtime: can expect how often and how late can it get?
• Weekend Work: do they have to work on weekends in office, client site or at home?
• After-office hour maintenance: do they have to do system backup, or software updates / deployments after 6pm on weekdays or weekends? Or is there a system/deployment engineer or system administrator for that?
• Time-off: if they are involved in after-office hour backups/deployments at night (7pm-10pm) or early morning (1am-4am), are they required to report back for work at 8:30am until 6pm (assuming no OT) the following day?
• Career progression: are application consultants pressured to take on team lead or project management role? Can they choose to stay on technical route and be some solution architect role in their 40s and 50s?

NCS have very bad reputation in the market, think twice before joining...

Any better alternatives to suggest?

An IT grad looking for a job to pay the bills and put food on the table.

1. What do NCS application consultants do?
2. What is the difference compared to software engineers in NCS?
3. Is it mostly development or maintenance projects?
4. Is it more project management (talking to customers, presenting solutions, budgeting) or technical (implementation, design, development and deployment of projects) in nature?
5. Do they handle the server infrastructure and network themselves or they rely on server team or network team?

Anyone can share/reveal?

1. Depending on projects, you can be either in one of the following :
a. Base in Hub
b. Base in client side
c. Base in Hub but travel to client side for meeting/deployment/testing (Since access to UAT and above environment is restricted to only at client side hence cannot do in hub or home)
Option B and C are more common.

2. For development project, definitely will have OT, latest should be 2-3am. But expect to work overnight during production deployment of brand new system aka first launch.

Maintenance project usually can end work on time but when there is big CR, you are expected to work OT but not as late as development project maybe 10-11pm

3. Weekend work is highly dependent on project unless project is on fire they won't call you back on weekends.
If you on 24/7 support then if system got critical bug then you would get called back to office on weekend to fix the bug

4. System backup and software patching is done by infra team.
Within the team there might be a deployment team or just every take turns to deploy. As for deployment, it is totally dependent on the system and customer. Some are ok with deployment during working hours, some die die can only deploy after working hours.

5. Usually if you work until until 1am, you can report to work slightly later at around 10am but depend on your project manager. 10pm is not considered late and you are expected to report to office during normal time next day hehe.

Usually if weekend work, you get off in lieu of abt 3 days work for 1 day off in lieu. Then again depend on how good your project manager is.


6. Application consultant main work is development and coding. Unless the team is short on manpower, you won't get to do higher level work(Senior Application consultant work which is requirement gathering/Business analyst stuff). They won't ask you to do team lead/PM work as you are not experienced to handle them

After application consultant is senior application consultant... After senior application consultant you can choose to go on project mgmt path or architect path. (But usually fresh grad dun stay so long till this stage ^_^. Usually is move out after 2-4 yrs then come back if they want to as the pay you get by jumping out and back in is much higher than the pay you climb the ladder in ncs)


All of the above is subjected to which project you get assigned to. Different project can have very different culture and progression aka like a different company. If you get a sucky project, you only have 2 option which is to quit or request for change of project which is hard.
Getting a good project in NCS is equivalent to joining a good company. Getting a bad project is equivalent to joining a shitty company.

So if you are given a choice of project, please decide wisely before agreeing to go. If you are given no choice then too bad suck thumb.

Depending on you looking for technical path or project mgmt path haha.

For technical path, if you can't get into google, paypal, visa level company then system integrator company like NCS is definitely a good start. But ensure that you state the interest on the technology you want to build up on your first day self-introduction during the 5 weeks boot camp and they will consider it or else if you get shitty project then you are not gonna have a good progression be it internally or if you decide to job hop.
Other choice include : govtech

For non-technical path, is a bit hard to find but there is Accenture consulting, big 4 consulting, technology associate program from bank etc.....not much choice here as they usually require 3- 5 yrs of work experience and only these few companies are willing to take in fresh grad.

thirdly, start-up are very good for learning new technology but usually interview are very technical hence you need strong technical capability to get in and they pay very good for fresh grad on the high side of 4k

Starting pay 3.6. If u no experience, can try to grind there and get the exposure and experience bah then jump to a better place. Really can learn a lot from vendor side. Be prepared to work ot and weekends

if care about overtime better dont join NCS.

if my programming skill is bad, is it alright for me to join the position?

this position required good programming skill?

They will send you for course so you don't have to be worry. You should really consider before joining NCS. Where are you working right now? You want to switch over to NCS?