Need help with a query.

Knock yourself out with this handy-dandy date conversion cheat sheet.

SELECT JobDate, convert(varchar, jobdate,101) as something
FROM jobdetails

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You could use Substring to grab the MM DD and YYYYY

Declare @myDate as varchar(8)

set @myDate = '20161025' 

select  SUBSTRING ( @myDate ,5 , 2 )+'/'+SUBSTRING ( @myDate ,7 , 2 )+'/'+SUBSTRING ( @myDate ,1 , 4 ) 

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As Russ Suter has rightly stated dates to NOT get stored in a format, and the fact that your existing approach does not work suggests the column isn't a real date as far as the database is concerned. So it is something else that looks like a date.

yyyymmdd
20161027 that column could be an integer or string (e.g. char/varchar)

If you do not know the actual data type of that column you will not know how to handle it properly.

This article may help:
DATE and TIME ... don't be scared, and do it right (the first time)

no points please

I m not sure if you have SQL 2012 or not..If you have then Format is the best thing you can use.

--FOR SQL 2012+

DECLARE @DT AS VARCHAR(10) = '20160101'
SELECT FORMAT(CAST(@DT AS DATE),'MM/dd/yyyy')

GO

O/P
01/01/2016


--FOR SQL 2008+

DECLARE @DT AS VARCHAR(10) = '20160101'
SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(10),CAST(@DT AS DATE),101)

GO

O/P
01/01/2016

Hope it helps!!

VB approach

Private Function ParseDate(dateString As String, format As String) As Date?
    Dim dt As Date
    If Date.TryParseExact(dateString, format, Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, Globalization.DateTimeStyles.None, dt) Then
        Return dt
    End If
    Return Nothing
End Function
Private Function FormatDate(dt As Date, format As String) As String
    Return dt.ToString(format, Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)
End Function

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Using:

Dim dt = ParseDate("20160215", "yyyyMMdd")
If dt.HasValue Then
    MsgBox(FormatDate(dt.Value, "MM/dd/yyyy"))
Else
    MsgBox("Invalid date")
End If

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Try...

Dim provider As CultureInfo = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture
Dim dt As Date = DateTime.ParseExact("20160215", "yyyyMMdd", provider).ToString("MM/dd/yyyy")

Thanks. It worked!!

Radha - Just out of curiosity, were your values stored in a column with date format or varchar?  

As you can tell that was a big part of the answer that was not mentioned in the original question, and I don't see any follow-up from you before declaring 'it worked'.  

Thanks in advance.

It is Varchar. I just tried Russ's solution and it worked for me.