MCT Success Story: Ronald G. Demanovich
MCP Success Story
You'd think Ronald G. Demanovich would be jaded. After all, the veteran programmer and computer science educator has been in the field since the beginning of personal computing. He's seen it all and taught it all, since the early days of Quick Basic. But Demanovich is anything but jaded.
"We're excited, our students are excited, and when I see that look in their eyes that says ‘I get it,' it's very gratifying," says Demanovich, a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) for SetFocus, based in Parsippany, New Jersey.
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Excitement About .NET-Connected Solutions
What's causing all this excitement? Demanovich has the opportunity to train students to create Microsoft .NET-connected solutions. SetFocus considers itself one of the leading Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers (Microsoft Certified Partner(s) for Learning Solutions programs) for Microsoft .NET in the country. Certainly, its .NET "Master's Program" is one of the most innovative and extensive .NET training programs anywhere.
Students immerse themselves in 13 weeks of integrated and customized Official Microsoft Learning Products that provide what Demanovich calls "a continuous learning experience." Students participate in classes and hands-on labs all day and, when they go home, have another two-to-five hours of homework each night. The program culminates with students working together to produce a full, distributed .NET-connected application.
"Our .NET students really span the spectrum from those who are right out of school to mid- and late-career developers who want to retool their skills to the hottest part of the market," says Demanovich. "People are interested in .NET because they see they can leverage their skills to be far more productive than they ever thought possible. .NET is enabling people to turn the Internet into a fully distributed computing platform for the first time. There's been a lot of talk about that before, of course, but .NET is the technology that delivers on it. And .NET gives us the opportunity for real code reuse, so developers spend less time writing redundant code and more time actually solving the problem at hand. Our students really like that."
Learning from MCTs and Real-World Analogies
SetFocus also offers more traditionally organized Microsoft curriculum that students can take by day or night. Either way, the training prepares developers for their MCSD for .NET certification. SetFocus was a pioneer in .NET training, offering it as soon as the technology became available. "We've learned that some people, particularly developers coming out of the traditional Visual Basic world, need to be eased into object-oriented, event-driven programming," says Demanovich. "So we draw analogies to real-world situations, because people learn from analogies. We also use real-world scenarios. And we have lots of hands-on time, because people learn by doing."
People also learn when they're taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers. "I think it's very important that we're a Microsoft Certified Partner(s) for Learning Solutions program and that our in-depth programs are taught by MCTs—and so do our students," says Demanovich. "Because of our certifications and our relationship with Microsoft, we can bring our students information that's as close to the source of this technology as possible. And we can customize courseware to meet the unique needs of students and of our corporate customers."
Demanovich first came to SetFocus four years ago to gain his own MCP certification in order to enhance and validate his expertise in developing solutions with Microsoft Visual Basic. He caught the eye of his instructors and it wasn't long after graduation from the SetFocus Masters' Program that Demanovich became a consultant and instructor for the company, teaching the courses he'd recently taken. Demanovich went on to earn his MCSD certification, to teach more than 16 Master's Program sessions, and to log more than 8,800 hours of training to date. He keeps his skills up to date by taking the latest Microsoft courseware, by attending conferences and classes, and by reading voraciously.
90 Percent Job-Placement Rate
Most of Demanovich's students do equally well. The placement rate for SetFocus' .NET Master's Program graduates is as high as 90 percent. More and more students are coming to the program with Visual Basic or even Java training, wanting to retool and make themselves more marketable. Evidently, they're succeeding.
For example, after completing the SetFocus Master's Program, Alan Chu landed a developer's job with an ISV that creates Web-based, help-desk software. He contributed his expert knowledge of .NET-connected software development by helping the company to add new features and to migrate existing features to the .NET Framework. Chu's contribution helped the ISV to cut both the size of its source code and its time to market by more than 50 percent.
"In our most recent Master's Program, we had one student who didn't even make it to graduation," says Demanovich with a chuckle. "He was hired away while he was still in class. He ended up missing the last three days, but he got what he came here for: entrance into the most exciting area of software development today."