How a Salesforce user group changed life of these 3 students

You all are aware how I started Bikaner Salesforce Students Group ( formerly known as India Students Salesforce Developer User Group), which was the first Student’s user group in India and my main source of self study which made me self tech myself salesforce and then helped others do the same.

This all started in 2012 after attending the India tour and then this group changed my life which included landing my first job offer and then writing my two books on salesforce and the success continued and you might have seen my success story in this TED talk -> Life’s New Syllabus . Since then I have been organizing meetups from 2012.

Bikaner is north western India’s small town where we used to get 5,10 or sometimes 20 students attending our meetup from 5 different Engineering colleges in the area.

Since 2012 I met variety of students and few salesforce professionals in this user group’s meetups. Every year mostly 1 or 2 students used to stay touch with me and get help and passed out certifications and landed jobs in near by areas mainly Jaipur.

But this year was great! This year 3 students made out to become salesforce developer and this was not possible without help of Salesforce.com Developer Relations Team.

One year back three students came to me asking for help to learn Salesforce just after attending our June 2016 Meetup. These all seemed to me very excited to learn this new tech but they had some constraints –

1. Poor knowledge of English as a Language ( as they all were from Hindi medium schools).
2. Poor financial background ( they all were from remote towns of Rajasthan state and had educational loan on them to pay off).
3. Pressure of getting a job ( since they were doing engineering studies on loan it was essential for them to get job right after the college is over ).
4. Communication Skills.

Looking at their excitement and question they were asking about Salesforce.com I decided to ask them for commitment to attend each meetup I organized thereafter and a 40 minutes morning google hangout every weekday. It was time of emerging 4G internet in India and luckly they got free internet access. They used to gather at one place and use one hotspot which they bought by each other’s help.

This is what we started doing in daily google hangouts at 7 AM –

1. Reading an english newspaper daily and coming out with new words they discover each day for the first 20 minutes of the call.
2. Salesforce topics dicussion and learning.
3. Assignment for the next day.

We continued the above pattern for first 3 months and then introduced trailhead at the place of assignments.

For the very first weeks everything seemed to be impossible as english was really really bad. But soon after 3 months things started working. They were doing great on the configuration side.

With each meetup they used to present and teach other students and their confidence started building up.

Photos from July and August 2016 meetup –

Soon after 6 months they were doing some basic visualforce and apex this was something they never thought.

Days passed and they now started giving presentation in their college and this was something taking them away from other students ( they out of the crowd of ordinary students).

Last year the college placement was low and it was a strong prediction for current year too, they were afraid of not getting job this year but I asked them to focus on what we are doing in assignments and trailhead.

Look at the photos soon after one year they were teaching other in the same User Group meeting –

And now I am proud to announce that all 3 students got job. This was not possible without their hardwork and dedication.

Here are some details of these students-

1. Surendra Bishnoi from Bhinmal,Rajasthan, India got job in VersatileCapitalist Software Inc. – Jaipur, India
2. Omprakash Saini from Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, India got job in Kcloud Technologies – Faridabad, India
3. Yogeshwar Tailor from Sikar, Rajasthan got job in C Centric Solutions Pvt. Ltd. – Bengaluru, India

This year I plan to help atleast 3 more students to develop their career on top of Salesforce.com

I would really like to thank Salesforce.com Developer Relation Team which always helped us.

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