Desperate job hunters are getting cheated easily

A recent news item in The Hindu newspaper brought out a bitter fact. The crux is: there are many training institutes cheating poor students who are desperate to get job. They promise jobs in big companies, get money from students, give fake offers and disappear. They get huge money from students and promise a job in top 10 companies in India! For more details, read

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/article3026770.ece

What drives a student to do this? Desperation. Somehow I want to get employed. Education loan repayment on one side, pressure from parents on other side, no proper guidance etc. add to their agony and they suddenly go to this suicidal job attempt. For a moment imagine that you are one such student and got fake job offer; can you tell this incident to your kid or grand kid? Is it an achievement to tell? Students must think before they fall into this trap.

What students need is patience, rigorous practice and commitment. Practice makes man perfect. Nothing else can help. You need to be ready to take the job; job will come to you. Unfortunately people want job before they are ready for the job! There is no short cut to become proficient in subject. Today proficiency is required as every technology is reaching the highest quality and now it is not possible to hire people and then make them proficient. Every industry is facing shortage of time. Industry needs proficient people and that availability of proficient people is very less in our Indian market. Every individual needs to understand that they have to work for their earning. Very few are lucky in this. Most of them have to sweat.

Our belief is every individual has the potential within him/her, and our aim is to open up the inner knowledge which every individual possess and make them capable of facing the interview and succeed without even have a doubt in them. It is like a seed fallen on a land and nobody to water; that is the present condition of our students. We are here to water them, nurture them and bring them to market need. What we need is your belief in your strength.

With shortage of teachers, travel issues across cities, etc. the only way to make this happen is thru online education. Open Mentor aims to do this in whatever way it can.

 

NASSCOM has urged students to be careful of such fraudulent offers. “Companies have an operation process, details of which are available on their websites. Students can always call the numbers listed to get more clarity, instead of falling prey to the fake offers,” says K. Purushottaman, regional director, NASSCOM. “And, never trust any company that asks you to deposit money affront. No reputed company will ever ask you to do that.”

* Our courtesy to Mr. K. Sriraman (Delivery Head, Softsmith.com) for sending this posting to us.

Introducing Lucky Bugs Contest

Welcome to Lucky Bugs contest.

We want to challenge anyone who claims to test software, by providing applications that have bugs. You need to find those.

Every week, a new application will be provided.

Winners get the following rewards.

One first prize.
60% discount on any of our online or face to face courses.
Rs. 1000 cash award, if you are in India.

Two second prizes.
50% discount on any of our online or face to face courses.
Rs. 500 cash award, if you are in India.

Three third prizes.
40% discount on any of our online or face to face courses.

Simple rules for the contest. Let us not make it complicated.

• You need to have a valid login id in our www.openmentor.net portal.
• You go thru the application specifications.
• You need to access the application thru the url given by us.
• Write test cases. It must be in an excel sheet with test case id, test steps, expected results columns.
• Test the application. When you find the bugs, write bug report.
• Use excel sheet for bug report. The columns must be one line bug description, steps to reproduce.
• Once you are done with testing, send the excel sheets to our email id lucky_bugs@softsmith.com
• You can avail only one discount at a time. Once availed, the discount expires.
• You can gift your reward to your friend. He or She must me a member of www.openmentor.net.

How do we declare the winner?

• Your test cases and bug reports will be reviewed by our experts.
• Number of tests, number of bugs you bring out, quality of the reports will be judged by our experts.
• Based on that we will declare the winner.
• Late submissions will not be entertained.
• Decision made by our experts is final and there is no obligation for disclosing details by our experts

Click Here for Lucky Bugs App Specifications - 23-Mar2012

Click Here for Luck Bugs Application Access - 23-Mar2012

Last Date for Submission: 30-Mar-2012 Midnight India Time

Poor Employability - a national problem

This morning, when I saw this news, I was shocked to the core.
Read this: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-educationplus/article3010274.ece

The text goes like this:

Engineering education is expanding but quality engineers aren't being produced by it. The quality of education dished out can be judged from the scenario that the percentage of ready-to-deploy engineers for IT jobs is dismally low at 2.68 per cent of the among five lakh engineers passing out every year in the country. In fact, among these five lakh engineers, only 17.45 per cent are employable for the IT services sector, while a dismal 3.51 per cent are appropriately trained to be directly deployed on projects. Only 2.68 per cent are employable in IT product companies, which require greater understanding of computer science and algorithms, according to the National Employability Report of Engineering Graduates.

What can we do to counter this problem?

We can all talk about change and that is not an easy task. Bringing a change in our whole education system is a huge task. But certain small steps can help us to counter this issue.

Many of these points are proposed, but never acted upon. It is better to make the basic steps first and then go for bigger challenges.

Step 1: Engineering exam system must give more importance to problem solving. Now people can get away by writing a 72 page pure-theory answer sheet; people pass with glory but the industry suffers. This will definitely make the pass percentage to go low (as low as 10% !!!) - let it be. Students have chances to overcome in one more attempt. But it will ensure that they have to work harder.

Step 2: Industry and university must establish small cells within the campus to expose people to soft skills and professional expectations. Even if people pass the hard skill tests, they fail this test miserably. We have seen companies training people in teaching them how to write proper emails!!! From 2012, where are we heading?

Step 3: Engineering college lecturers and professors must compulsorily attend industry training and impart that to students. This must happen every year. There must be a reverse feedback on the teaching community by students. Then real quality teachers will emerge. Currently teachers feel left out by the industry.

Step 4: More online learning must happen. This will help a good professor to reach more students, by overcoming the physical location related issues.

BTW, www.openmentor.net now has a new website and you can start viewing our free online lectures at http://www.youtube.com/freeopenmentor.

How to reap the full benefit from webinars?

Many webinars are conducted by various individuals or companies. Some are promotional and some are educational. If you want to get the full benefit of webinars that are educational, here is what you need to do.

1. Make sure you have at least a broadband connection. This is vital. If this is not there, you will have issues on audio as well as video.
2. Have a good audio headset. Most of the webinar tools come with VOIP facility so that you can hear the voice using a headset.
3. If you have problem either in audio or video, do not send chat messages to the presenter; simply disconnect and reconnect. This is one of the most commonly faced problems in webinars. 99 people will be happy and one person does not hear the voice and he/she will send repeated chat messages to the presenter.
   
4. Do stay till the end of the webinar. Crux of the topic will be reiterated towards the end. Hence do not drop out in between.
5. Never ask a question to the presenter, that is out of context. That question may be important to you; if it is not relevant to the topic or your timing of asking the question is not right, it will never get answered.
6. Take notes during webinars. This basic thing will take you a long way.
7. Before or after the webinar, read some material in the relevant area. This will enrich your expertise further.
8. The site that provides webinars, will usually provide presentations or other recorded content as well. Use them as needed.
9. If you feel that the person who presents is not giving relevant details for the topic chosen, tell that boldly thru feedback. Do not hesitate. Presenter cannot waste your time.
10. If webinar is good, refer the same to your friends. If you show direction of benefits to others, they will also reciprocate.

Visit us at http://www.openmentor.net.

Free Education over internet - are you happy?

When so many training outfits can charge huge amount of money, OpenMentor provides you the best quality education over the net, for free. Are you able to get the fruit out of it? How is it useful to you? What problems you face to attend these sessions? Share all those in this blog.