ETL Informatica and ETL Teamworker have in common

Sometimes it's not easy to persuade recruiter you are the best candidate and possess all the main skills required by customer. Especially when he doesn't know too much about your field. So your guess is right. The answer to the title question is simple. They have recruiters in common!

The call I had recently confirmed once again that some agents have no idea about the skills they are selling to their clients. Now I understand why we sometimes got people with very different skill set than we demanded.

But back to the interview. The agent was polite and talkative (no surprise) and we spent quite a while talking about the potential project. One of the nice-haves was ETL Informatica. I tried to explain her several times that although I don't have any real hands-on experience with Informatica, I passed several trainings on it and had some time to play with it. Moreover, I have experience with other ETL tools. But she somehow didn't get it. First I thought it was because of my English. As I'm not a native speaker I sometimes have very creative wording. But then she asked me the question that explained everything: "So you have never done ETL Informatica?" The lady didn't differentiated between ETL and Informatica! She thought ETL Informatica is some kind of process or methodology that is to be used at her client.

I explained her that ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load and Informatica is vendor who sells software for ETL. I compared it to car manufactures. You have Ford and Mercedes. Both make cars. In general, the cars are same. If you can drive the car, you can drive Ford and Mercedes. (I apologise for simplification. I know there is a difference between Ford and Mercedes.) Similar situation is in ETL software market. Informatica is one ETL software vendor. Then there is IBM with DataStage, Oracle with Warehouse Builder and Data Integrator (this probably slightly confused her) and several others. If I have experience with three or more ETL tools the chance I would understand other ETL tool is very high. The lady seemed satisfied so hopefully she got the main difference between ETL and Informatica.