Saturday, July 6, 2013

Consulting vs. Full-time

There were two distinct business models that have worked for the last few years.

1) Bring qualified people from India - Large Consulting companies in India have a terrific training and mentoring program in India.  Usually if you can find an employee with 5 years of real time experience from India, it would be very easy to place them as consultants in USA.  This was the dominate business model from 1997 until 2010.

2) In 2010 onwards the USCIS changed their policy and made getting an H1B approval and stamping done from India, almost impossible.  This caused for a shift in the business model and from 2010-2012 most companies did very well training recent masters graduates and placing them as consultants.  Each company had an area of focus and it did not really matter what the area of focus was, a majority of them did very well.

We have now entered 2013 and it seems like both of the above models are dead.  Currently the IT market is looking for either full-time employees or for very senior level IT consultants.  Sometimes it amazes me how quickly a change occurs.

With the new immigration bill on everyone's mind, I had a chat with the head of a large Indian IT consulting company and I see another change in the market ahead.

Here is the future of IT in my view:

Most consulting companies have come to realize that there is simply no way that the US government is going to let companies get away with having large amounts of staff on H1B, L1, B1 etc..  They have come to the realization that they will be forced to have 50% of Greencard (GC) or Us Citizens (USC), if not immediately then soon.  With this in mind I have started getting inquiries from Large IT Consulting  companies if I will train recent college graduates for them.  They will apparently hire them out of college at $30,000 - $40,000 on a fulltime salary and then send them to us for 3-4 months and they want us to train them in various technologies.  So far I have gotten a request for training for 20 students to get trained in JAVA (Core annd J2EE) plus SQL BI.

Based on my experience I think the model going forward that will be successful will be to train US Citizens and Green Card holder in:

1) Train on JAVA along with database knowledge and allow large companies to come and recruit and hire as full-time employees.  Most new software are based on JAVA as a back end.   From Guidewire to Lombardi, almost all the new successful software requires a knowledge of JAVA.

2) Work with large IT recruiters and see what demand they have and train for that niche with a contract in hand.

With all this in mind I think VXL has come to a crossroad.  We must decide what our future is going to be.