Embedded Systems

I told you all that I have recently started marketing.  I have placed a few Embedded Systems engineers and I need about 40 more right away.

If you guys know of any Electrical Engineers or Electronics Engineers please refer them to me right away, I can get them a job in just 30 days.

I am getting bombarded with requests for Embedded Engineers I have never seen the demand this strong.  This bodes well for the job market in general, that means that companies are spending money on development and that is always the first cut in slow down and always the last to return.

I know the saying is:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

I have decided to change this based on my current needs.

Give me you unemployed, your poor,
Your electrical engineers yearning to get a job.
The  wretched electronics engineers also,
Send these, the engineers, to me.

JAVA and .NET

My head of marketing resigned yesterday and I was marketing today and I have to say that it was a big eye opener.  Out of the 3000 new jobs that were  sent to me to see if I could fill the position about 40% were for JAVA openings and another 30% were for .NET openings, leaving 30% for all the other technologies.

With so much unemployment in USA, I wonder if anyone even knows that there are probably a hundred thousand open jobs in just JAVA and .NET alone in USA.

Everyone that comes to me wants to only learn functional subjects.  Nobody wants to do hard job of learning to do coding anymore.

JAVA jobs are  paying $60 per hour currently and with a few years of experience the pay scale goes up to $80 per hour.

I have said it in the past and I am going to say it again, ever single student or recent graduate needs to take JAVA and PL/SQL or .NET and PL/SQL.  If you are not working there is nobody to blame but yourself.

We train students in JAVA in 90 days and within another 30 days have them working.

We train students in .NET in 60 days and within another 45 days have them working.

We train students in PL/SQL in 14 days and you can even get jobs in PL/SQL but the bill rates are very low.

Besides just stating the facts and telling students through the blog about the demand for JAVA and .NET jobs, I am not sure how else I can spread the message.

I probably get 100 calls a month for training in BA, and maybe one call a month for training in JAVA or .NET.  The demand is so low, I have even stopped answering people emails for BA training.  There is no use in learning BA when it is so hard to get you a job.

I have a friend that owns a major online training company and he was telling me that he trains 10 batches at a time in BA.  I am sure that very few of his students get jobs after the training, but even if you tell people these statistics people will still want to take the BA training.  Everybody wants the easy job and nobody wants to do the hard work anymore even if it pays more.

Duty

I prefer a life of simplicity.  I hardly care where I live, what I drive, or what I wear.

I was thinking of how to make my life simpler and I think there is no way to do that.
 
My life is so involved in my employees and my students, there is no way I can simply leave and live a simpler life.  My dereliction of duty will affect so many other people, I could not do that.  I do not want my needs or wants to affect people negatively that rely on me.
 
So I will keep the businesses growing and keep working hard and the dream of simplicity will be just that, a dream.

I was reading an article about two friends that sold their company for hundreds of millions.  One friend retired immediately and started traveling the world.  The other friend started another company and kept working.  His friend asked him why, and he said, he felt a sense of duty to his employees that were let go when they sold the company and he started another company not to make more money, but because he knew he could help his employees make a living.

I loved that story.  It would be easy for me to sell all my interests in everything that I own and live comfortably for the rest of my life.  But I will not do that, because I do feel a great sense of duty to my employees, students and my business partners.  I know that as long as I am in charge we will be successful and that success is good for everybody involved with me.

Arrogance

I get hundreds of calls a day and about 500 emails a day and I make it a point to answer every single call and email.  I was talking to a student on the phone  and suddenly he said to me, "you are very arrogant."

I stopped and thought back to what I had said and I could see how he would feel that way.  I recently have been accepting very few students for training and placements.  I have chosen to be very picky.  All this came down, because I used to feel that I could place anybody into a job, it simply did not matter who they were.  I was wrong.

I had a student from Nepal that had very weak communication skills and on top of that he used to pause when he talked and during phone interviews everyone felt like he was looking up information before he answered, when in reality that is just how he spoke.

The problem is that once I accept you I take responsibility for you and I will do whatever it takes to get you placed.  I tried and tried and spent at a minimum of $10,000 on him, and finally when I wanted to spend even more and keep trying, my partners pulled the plug on me and said no more, and that they did not want me spending any more money on him.

So I finally gave him his 2 week notice and let him go.  It was hard for me to accept failure, but I bowed my head and said, yes I have failed.

From that moment on, I simply do not just take just anybody anymore.  Most student will call me on the phone and I have to judge them within seconds if I want to accept them or not.  I usually ask them with lots questions all at once and see how they answer under duress and if I am interested I will slow down and get to know them better, if I am not interested I will ask for a resume or some other documents and then let it go at that.  The most important skill I look for nowadays is communication.  If you pass that, then I look for more, like how well you answer my barrage of questions and in what order.

The problem is that if I accept you, it will likely cost me thousands of dollars to train you and place you, and it is very rare that I give up on anybody.  So if I have accepted you, I have pretty much committed to spend whatever it takes to place you, and I have placed almost everyone that I have accepted.  I am sure my partners in the company would wish that I spent less money, but I simply do not care about money, all I care about is the success of my students and nothing else really matters to me.

So anyway this student called me arrogant.  Once I lose interest in you, I simply do not have the time or inclination to hear their stories anymore, so I do become disinterested and possibly arrogant, because there is no way I am going to accept you.

I am sure I have rejected more students than most companies have accepted for training.

If you have great communication skills and are decently smart then I want you.

If you have self-confidence and are willing to work 12 hours a day during our training then I want you.

So I am sorry that I am arrogant, but I do not have time to coddle you, your mother is there for that.

Feedback From Corporate Training

The feedback we got from our corporate training we have been doing has been terrific.

The same students had attended SAP training at SAP and for the exact same course they have been attending our course.

OK, we did not give them some fancy book that you will never touch again, like SAP does, but what we gave them was some thing much better, we gave them actual knowledge reinforced with live SAP Programming from the very first day.

Every concept was followed by an sample program on that concept.

The positive feedback was:

Impressive
I learned so much
I loved it
You guys are the best

We also got negative feedback:

You should print out all the exercises in a book or on handouts

OK, so that was the extend of the negative feedback.  We obviously did a good job, we got extended for more training on September 10-14.

I have always said that I love feedback.  Good or Bad, I simply love feedback.  In fact some of the best feedback I got were from 5 students that had come to me from HP, and ripped me a new one when we first started VXL Training.  But that negative feedback was the impetus to improve and to reach where we are today.

There is a quote by Henry Ford that I love:

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

I really do not know who my competitors are in MI?  I work 7 days a week not because I have to, but I simply love to become better at what I do.  I learn every single day.

I can promise you that I will make VXL Training a company you will be proud to have in the community.

I can promise you that VXL Training will continue to live up to our tag line: Training For A Better Future.

Award - Best Computer Training - Novi MI

Here is our award for Best Computer Training 2012 - Novi MI

Press Release:

I am pleased to announce that VXL Training has been selected for the 2012 Best of Novi Awards in the Computer Training category.

Congratulations on joining such an elite group of small businesses.