Are You being fooled in the name of - "Industrial Training"?

'Industrial Training'- a very crucial part of our Engineering program. we are all running in the rat-race for getting jobs and to earn money, but I think that somehow we are lagging in our skills to represent ourselves as an asset to an organization. Students nowadays are more concerned about the "certificate" rather than the skill itself. 

There are so many institutes and skill centers in every part of the town that showcase themselves as the top-notch training center in the entire place.

They promise you a rapid growth in your skill-set, stable Job, certificates, other benefits and what not? All of this within 6-Weeks of training. The deal looks promising, isn't it? but the fact is that "Training Institute" is a booming business nowadays, there are certain steps that you need to follow in order to start this business. Out of those, the important one is not to find teachers that are highly skilled to train students and to teach them a particular skill but to find Start-Ups. Exactly! these types of institutes are always looking for Start-Ups that will hire their "so-called highly skilled students" who have gone through a 6-week training program and has a "certificate of Authenticity". 

I am not saying that all the training institutes are doing this same thing, but most of them are just business and nothing else. So, how do you find the actual training institute that focuses on the overall development of the students? The answer is - You don't need to find one. If you are really willing to learn something new, to increase your skill-set try to learn that skill online. There is nothing better than the internet itself and you'll learn a lot more on the internet rather than wasting your time in searching for the 'best training institute in the town'. The problem with the training institutes is that there are a lot of students learning the same skill at the same time and there is only one teacher who is teaching that skill, this creates problems in the long run, all the things look pretty good when you start the training but as soon as the course develops the teacher is not going to pay attention to each and every student in the class. But again this is not the exact case, exceptions are always there and it depends on the teachers and their teaching skills and after all, teachers are meant for the guidance so they will always help you eventually. The problem with the "Other types of the Institutes" is that they restrict their teachers to teach and to share an extra bit of their knowledge to the students, there are predefined topics and modules that they are bound to teach and nothing more than that. If you are the type of student who will need external guidance and also want a certificate for your training, the first thing I'll suggest you is to take a breath and try to find about your interests and choose the skills that are easy for you and the skills that you are more comfortable with , it could be anything from IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Digital Marketing, Android, Web Designing, Php, python to Dancing, Music, Guitar, etc. but you must be self-assured about choosing the skill.  

Here I'll talk about the Internet of Things only. If you've made your plans that you want to continue with IoT then there's a couple of things that you need to consider before choosing the right Institute.

First, "Check your Syllabus"- Most of the training institutes do not provide the syllabus for the skills that they are teaching or should I say for the "certificate they are selling." so you have to avoid that. First, try to understand the technology completely and create a rough sketch in your mind on how things should work and what exactly you'll be learning in that skill. If you are completely satisfied with the syllabus then only you should approach that institute.

Second- "The Teacher", it all depends upon the skills of the teacher. If the teacher is a professional in his field, simply go for it. Now the question arises that how would you get to know about the teacher? Simply attend some demo classes and try to get in touch with the teacher, ask them your doubts regarding that particular skill, go check their profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., ask other students who are already there in that institute and you'll get to know about everything that's important to make a choice. 

Third- "The Major Project", this is the crucial part of the training program. There should be a major project that must be included in your 6-week training program. Major projects are very important in order to test your knowledge and the skill that you have learned over the period of 6-weeks. They are the reality check of your knowledge. I'll recommend you to choose the toughest project for yourself in order to test your skills because that's the only right thing to do. Higher the number of challenges in your project, higher will be your knowledge in that skill. 

 They say- "we must learn from our mistakes". But here I'm sharing the mistake that I've made while choosing the "Right Institute" for something that I was really interested in. I've done my engineering in Electronics and Communication Engineering and during the pre-final year, I was looking for a 6-Week training program to brush up my skills in the field of IoT so I joined a training program but I was unaware of the syllabus and that was my mistake. 

we were only taught about the basic definition and architecture of the Internet of things and we got our hands on the very basic micro-controller and i.e. Arduino (nowadays the students in 6th standard knows about this little developer board) and there was a simple DIY project with a third-party mobile app called "BLYNK" by which we can change the color of an LED and we got to learn about the Raspberry Pi and how to set up a Rpi board and that's it. The syllabus was completed and they charge 8000 INR for this course. There were no discussions about Machine to Machine communication, how to transfer data over wifi modules and how to interface sensors and what are the important communication protocols in IoT and many other things, but I knew that this is not enough and I want to learn more about IoT so I started learning more and more about this growing technology and implemented my theoretical knowledge into projects. My major project was "Complete Home-Automation" and that too without using any third party application, implementing my own server, integrating the project with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. It then took me almost 10-11 months to get complete knowledge of all these things and this time I am very much thankful to the Internet. Talking about the certificate, it was already in the Dustbin.