Archive for the ‘Steve Satterwhite’ Category

We currently have 95% Very Satisfied customers here at Entelligence IT. Most people in our business would be deliriously happy with that, but we are not. Our goals is to have every single company we work with (and, by extension, every single person) give us a 5 (Very Satisfied) on our 1-5 satisfaction scale. We want 100% ‘Very Satisfied’, and we won’t stop working on it until we’re there.

But, I acknowledge that 95% is remarkable, so let’s talk about how I think we achieve that number:

• First, we hire only the best people. We carefully select just the right person for the job. In a business that is scrambling to find enough qualified people, it is sometimes difficult to pass over a candidate who we desperately need to wait for the RIGHT candidate. But we do just that, and we reap the benefits of being patient and selective.
• We continuously train and re-train our people so that they stay current. They are always prepared and up-to-date on the latest trends and technology. Their tool box is replenished as often as necessary.
• We as a company support our experts in the field with a ‘team behind every tech’. They never have to go it alone. Answers and help are at their fingertips every minute of every day.
• We’ve built a great workplace that’s friendly and efficient. It’s collaborative, fast-moving, and fun.

Because of that, we have exceedingly low turnover. In a business where more than half of IT workers are looking for greener pastures, our turnover is less than 10%. That means our techs get to know their clients, and they go deep with them, understanding in detail their issues, their people, and their industries.

So, if you want to join an organization like ours and help us on our quest to hit 100% Very Satisfied, click here and check out our NetApp jobs, CommVault jobs, and others.

Just received an email from Ryan Carson, CEO of Treehouse about the new investment from Chamath and Greylock.

I met Ryan a couple of months ago and wrote about him and Team Treehouse for this CNBC.com article.  Treehouse creates and delivers Web development and Web programming courses online.  So far, thousands have been through his program and, from the vote of confidence from this investment, looks like thousands more will be joining the Treehouse program.

Ryan and his team are one shining example of how to close the Skills Gap.

Today, there are millions of Americans out of work.  Millions more are underemployed.  And yet, here in the IT world, there are millions of unfilled jobs at companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and, well, just about everywhere.

Why?  Because we simply don’t have enough skilled workers with the technical training they need to be successful in the current job market.

Ryan and Treehouse are out to change that.  Congratulations!

And you can read more about this here on TechCrunch.

So, I’m reading a story today that ran in this week’s Seattle Times about how students interested in science and mathematics can win a STEM scholarship for $1000. While I’m all for incentivizing people, I think it helps if you first understand what you’re trying to do, and what you want the outcome to be.

Offering students $1000 to make them care about science and mathematics to fill in the Skills Gap is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. It’s going to take a while and I’m probably not going to live long enough see the results.

Let’s take a minute and stack the 1000 bucks up against some other numbers that matter. Seventeen million Americans have finished college and are currently doing jobs that do not require a degree. That means your local Barrista with a Bachelor of Arts in English lit is likely making your espresso right next to someone with only a high school education.

For the first time in history we owe more on college loans than we owe on credit card debt. We owe 828 BILLION dollars in student loan debt. A thousand dollars isn’t going to go far there, is it?

There are 3-4 million jobs in the high tech business that are not being filled. My industry is growing by a factor of 50 while the number of people with the skills to do those jobs grows by a factor of only 1.5.

There’s an elephant in the room that I think has to be addressed before we can really get down to business and solve the problem: College is not for everyone, and if higher education was the cure, we’d have more people prepared for the new world we live in.

Instead, the skills gap continues to grow. The number of high school kids bored and dropping out is on the rise. And, our answer is to give them $1000 scholarship toward an education that will likely cost them 100 times that much, if not more.

I see it firsthand every day. We at Entelligence IT have jobs that pay very well available with or without a college degree. We are looking to hire people every week for  NetApp jobs, CommVault jobs, Citrix jobs, and others that pay from $70,000-$170,000 a year. And yet we have a tough time filling those positions for the simple reason that there just aren’t enough people qualified to do the work.

The good news? There are new ideas being developed for education that will allow people to follow their passions and learn skills that they can use NOW to make a living and change the world a bit. Sites like Skillshare.com, Udemy.com, Treehouse.com , CodeAcademy.org, and others have figured out how to dispense and share information that matters in a cost effective and timely way.

I wish them all the best, because frankly I think we’re going to need a major overhaul and it’s probably going come from out-of-the-box thinkers who see the breadth and depth of the problem and are willing to try new methods to find one or more that work.

Mason Jones is one of my heroes.

Growing up in rural Georgia, Mason didn’t do well in school – or, as he puts it, “I barely got out of high school”. His big plan after graduation was to go to work for the tractor trailer manufacturer on the assembly line where he would do intense, manual labor every day. After a year on the job, Mason had an epiphany. “I decided,” he says, “to work with my mind. And, I wasn’t even sure what that meant at the time, but I was willing to find out.”
How do we make it easy and affordable for people to get the training they need now? And, how do we scale the solution so we can make huge progress now, not small steps over decades?

Click here to read the entire article on CNBC.com.