Back in the nineties, I was helping Russian immigrants living in the greater New York area to acquire the right skills and become software developers. Majority of the immigrants had Bachelor or Masters degrees in disciplines not related to IT. But high motivation to get an interesting and well-paid job did miracles. People were able to make serious turns in their careers and most of them survived economic crisis and still remain productive members of the American IT workforce.

Back in the nineties there where no reliable means for reaching the audience remotely. People would need to show up in the class. Things changed, and the live online training became a reality. I “ve been successfully teaching online classes in English reaching people from all over the world.

You may say, “Why bother with Russians? ” There are couple of reasons. First, I want to try to see if it “s possible to do business with those Eastern Europeans republics that used to be a part of the Soviet Union. I “m not talking about buying their services – our company already successfully outsources substantial of software development there. I want to sell them our services. Instead of sending the money out I want to bring the money in. Second, during this training I hope to find some talented programmers who might help in one of our future projects on the contracting basis.

The outsourcing model is overly expensive for American enterprises, but it works for a small company like ours. The reason is simple ndash; we pick every worker carefully and don “t keep any ballast. After interviewing lots and lots of job applicants from Eastern Europe, I can attest that most of the people who are on the freelance market lack skills required for the needs of our enterprises. I see an abundance of sysadmins and PHP programmers, which we don “t need.

We need people with solid J2EE (a.k.a. Java EE) background and Adobe Flex skills. Such people are hard to come by in that part of the world. But there is a certain amount of motivated people who are willing to get trained.

Starting from March 7 I “ll be teaching online master class on Java Programming for Russian-speaking people. It doesn “t matter in which country you live now, as long as you can understand conversational Russian language and read in English, you may benefit from this training. The 2.5-hour long lessons will take place on Mondays and Thursdays starting from around noon New York Time (GMT-5 or 20:00 in Moscow.

You “ll hear my voice and see my computer screen. You ‘ll be using the fresh Java Tutorial that I wrote for Wiley. You “ll be able to ask questions and do the homework. Visit this Web page for the program description and registration. You can also listen to the audio podcast, where I described this training (in Russian).

Interested? Then enroll in this class and get in charge of your career.

Update. The first Java class has been filled really fast and I opened enrollment to the second one .