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I have ASP.NET (C#) development experience of around 3 years and worked on SharePoint 2010 for 1 year. I did some branding to change the look of the portal and developed some VisualWebParts using Visual Studio 2010 and used on my portal page. I have knowledge of SharePoint Client Object model as I know how to query a list and fill the gridview and perform CRUD operations and developed a webservice to pass data to another application from SharePoint. I have experience of Nintex as well and all I did without any training and learned from forums.

I tried to give few interviews for "SharePoint Developer" job but failed to answer many questions as they were asking about writing "Features", "Branding deployment thru Visual Studio" and lots more...

Can you guys guide me what skills set I need to develop to become a professional SharePoint developer so I can practice in my virtual environment and get a grip on. There must be some areas of development I need to look into to come upto the expectation of the companies for this job.

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Your interviewing experience is likely to be vastly different each time you interview, for several reasons: the term "SharePoint Developer" means different things to different people, for example, and there are a great variety of technologies a given interviewer may or may not be looking for. Likewise any answer you get here is bound to be colored by the perspective of the answerer. For example, a consultant architect is bound to respond differently than an admin who has worked at the same place for years.

That said here's two area where I would focus my energy:

Know SharePoint from a user's perspective

Understand the basics of how lists, columns, content types, site collections and sites work. Get to know the commonly used features and what they do. Understand the out-of-the box web parts and how to configure them in different ways. Practice solving some common business problems without code so you can better understand the platform. Learning SharePoint development without understanding these things would be like a car mechanic who doesn't know how to drive.

Know how to solve problems

Here's the secret - many of the interview questions you are bound to get do not have definite answers. They are meant to spark a discussion which may or may not lead to a technical solution. For example, you indicated you wrote a visual web part that queried a list and filled a GridView. While that probably seemed like a great accomplishment, there were probably better, simpler, and more flexible ways to accomplish what you were trying to do. If you can understand why custom code is not always the best choice, and when it is, you are well on your way.

Finally, if a shameless self-promotion is acceptable here, I've been through the interview process from the other side of the table, and blogged some thoughts about what I look for. Link

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  • Derek lovely way of explain things to me...wish i cud choose ali's answer as well..you both were great i must say. Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 8:37
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It very much depends on what's your time scale.

Ideal
If you're not in a hurry to get a new job, then my recommendation would be to learn:

  • SharePoint 2013 from an End-User/Super-User perspective
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • JavaScript (not just the language but also modern JS patterns)
  • AngularJS
  • SharePoint CSOM/REST Apis
  • SharePoint App model

This will not help you answer the questions that many SharePoint shops will ask today, but this will prepare you to where SharePoint is heading and what these SharePoint shops will ask for in the future.

In a hurry
If you don't have the luxury of being able to do the right thing then you should learn the "old" way of developing for SharePoint as mentioned in the other answers

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  • Learn to create custom WFs (also consider learning Nintex WFs). Also I would recommend to focus on JS and CSOM/REST, because of application concept in SP2013. It is also good to know some JS framework (knockout) which can be helpful when implementing apps. Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 12:56
  • Custom workflows which is build into Windows WorkFlow Foundation you mean or what luccio? Commented Apr 17, 2014 at 10:02
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This is a tough question!

Each company is different and see specific requirements at different levels!

to me as a developer you have two fields that you need:

1) development

when you develop you need to know about webpart creation (c# or VB), masterpage and layouts (xml) and the deployment process

2) administration

knowing central admin and sharepoint front end

both are huge... today most employers are looking at:

webpart development, custom workflow development (seeing more of this), custom features, custom event handlers

to deploy the above and understand what is going wrong or updating you need to know the administration side like deploying wsp, updaing web.config/masterpage ect...

sharepoint is vast but the above is what i do on a daily basis like writing features ;).

Part 2

there is a second part to this:

when in an interview there are two stages.. your knowledge and your personality.

knowledge

this is what you know and the questions they will ask like the sharepoint site hierarchy. Youll be supprised that someone with 3 years experience wouldnt know this even tho its simple and was told in an interview at the time when i only had one year experience that i was better:

i think the question was on the lines of, list in order the sharepoint site hierarchy object model:

SPFarm SPWebApplication SPSiteCollection SPSite SPWeb

other questions would be do this (create two list and connect together) or fix this custom workflow...

This stage is up to you and how well you pick things up!

personality

This is the second part where you can shine! like asking questions that would make the interview more of a two way convo between each other.

you could have someone with plenty of knowledge but if they dont have the personality then good luck!

me personally in an interview i would like to see the interviewee knowledgeable to an extent as im not expecting a genious but someone who could work on their own or in a group and knows where to look when he/she is stuck!

the big player is the personality as i would have to work with them and need to know they are going to come in every day, is going to be a team player, is going to get well with others and does the job in time...

so knowledge is not everything when it comes to getting a job, these questions are only there to weed out the knows from knows not! its only part of it!.... maybe you should be looking for junior sharepoint developer jobs?

have a look at these questions that could help you along:

http://mosshelper.weebly.com/sharepoint-interview-questions-on-sharepoint-object-model.html

http://amitmathur-sharepoint.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/sharepoint-2010-interview-questions_11.html

look on youtube for interview questions to ask and techinques it will vastly help you out and give you a better chance!

the fact that your getting to interview stage means they are interested in you and your work but you need to improve on both areas, stage 1 is getting to know you and if you can cope with the work and under pressure.. stage 2 is about your personality and if you fit in!

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  • Ali thanks for the reply in great detail :) let's wait for other people to give more inputs. Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 12:12
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I recommend to you this book: http://www.amazon.it/Microsoft-Sharepoint-2013-Developer-Reference/dp/0735670714

This is my favourite book on SharePoint for developers.

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