Select the Best Training Place

"Your work is the presentation of your capabilities". You need to find the correct job on correct time. There are several milestones which are considered as the hardest decisions you have to make ever in your carrier path. Those are

• Choosing your first industrial training place
• Choosing your first job

Out of those two, choosing your first job is also highly influenced by your industrial exposure you earned at training place. You have to make the correct decision on that, or else you'll suffer from the bad influences of your decision through the entire life. It's not an easy task to do that correctly. You have to spend days and days to take the right decision. In this post I try to point you some important facts which will help you to make the correct decision on choosing the best fit training place for you.

As an undergraduate student you may not have much experience on how your academics related with the industry. Industrial training is the first time you get a chance to go into the industry and feel the reality of the industry. But at this point if you have chosen the wrong place to taste it, you will definitely get lost. When you get the list of opportunities, please consider following factors before shortlisting them.

• It should accordance with your future carrier.
• Companies expectations and your expectations should be inline.
• Nature of the company.
• Ask your seniors about the company and the culture.

Even though these ideas seems so simple they are very powerful. Following are the explanations of those facts.

• It should accordance with your future carrier - You need to have a clear idea on what technologies you are going to use in your future carrier. If you have a dream to be a Java programmer in the future, it will have more weight for your selection algorithm. If you need to be a Java programmer do not select something else, such as Web development or Mobile development. Even though all the technologies share some core concepts with them, each technology is using some unique concepts to decorate it. So by choosing the wrong option you will loose some interesting areas in your future plan. As an example if you choose php development for the training you may not need to define your variables at coding. So after couple of months you may loose the practice of defining variables which you gained by Java. It's a simple example and you can find many more crucial things with them.

• Companies expectations and your expectations should be inline - You need to know what are the expectations the company has on you. If they hire you only because they have some extra works which need to finish early as well as they don't need to let you learn anything new with those works, it will not be the correct option for you. Some companies hire trainees because it is cost effective for them. They don't let trainees to learn new things. They ask trainees to do the internal bug fixings, QA and documentations which will never expose you the the industrial experience. I have seen some students who didn't even experienced on version control systems during their internship. So don't choose that kind of companies for the training. Always choose companies which have higher expectations on trainees as well as have a good vision to help the trainee to improve himself in technology as well as communication.

• Nature of the company - If you need to learn everything withing a company, the best fit model is a small scale company. Small scale companies allow you to go through all the stages of a project as well as the marketing and sales strategies of those companies. So if you have an idea of having a start up in the future, you should select an small scale company to extract that knowledge. If you need to learn the big processes used withing large companies, you need to select a large scale company as your training place. But in most of the large companies you will not expose to the real business process they use. If you need to work on an opensource company you need to select such a company who work with opensource projects and products, or else you can choose a company which works with closed source projects and products.

• Ask your seniors about the company and the culture - There is a set of people who always willing to help you. Those are your seniors. So please contact your seniors who are working on those companies. They will definitely tell you the truth about the company unless they are the owners of that company. It's better if your training place has a peaceful culture which don't have unnecessary restrictions and collisions. If you hate working at night for the whole year, you should definitely avoid such companies. Even though it is must to meet the deadlines we cannot do it for all 365 days. If you don't care about night shifts and your only vision is to get the maximum exposure during your training period you better choose a company which expects your hard working.

In all those points I never mentioned about the salary your get. The salary has the minimum weight when comparing with above factors. Your salary in the training periods say nothing about the quality of the training you get. So don't think about salary. Money is not everything and it's only a one thing.

When you face to your fist job interview, they will definitely ask you about the training place. So there should be something to say about your training experience. I cannot say this is the best fitting model for your internship. You have to match your expectations with those factors.

Think Think and Think. Make your decision which will decorate your bright future.