After passing a company's aptitude testing programme I had an actual interview with them today (EDIT: yesterday. That'll teach me to post near midnight). Unfortunately all sides waited until the actual technical test to discuss the nitty-gritty of skillsets.
The job specification made fairly vague reference to entry-level Java development, which can cover a multitude of sins. I rather foolishly assumed my J2ME experience would help, unfortunately none of it had anything to do with JDBC connectivity and JSP, which is what the tech test was all about. I admitted that I didn't know anything about the problem area but was willing to give it a go, so they let me try in case I got the horse to talk
End result? I think I managed to connect to the database and execute a query, so hooray! Unfortunately this represented about 5 percent of the overall task I wasn't allowed access to the documentation for the simple reason that the documentation examples would have made it an exercise in pressing ctrl-c and ctrl-v, so I was reduced to browsing type hierarchies and making edumacated guesses about how things might work.
I don't know whether to be mildly proud that I managed to get anything done given how widely it differed from my experience, or deeply embarrassed that I applied for a role with the wrong skillset. I can at least say I gave it a bash.
With my forehead. Against the keyboard.
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