September 14. 2011 1:41PM
Coinciding with President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act, a Parsippany company has opened its resources to those looking for work in the information technology field.
SetFocus, which specializes in training and placing IT professionals, has opened its online training resources for free as a way to provide education for job searchers considering moving into IT.
“We have an 80 to 90 percent success rate in getting these professionals placed in jobs, so we’re very much on the job creation and sustainability spectrum,” said SetFocus President Jerry Masin. “We’ve been looking at how we can contribute to the local, state and national economy, in terms of our platform.”
Masin said the training modules available on the company’s website can be used various ways, including as a diagnostic tool to see if a person has the capability to do IT work, and also as a preparation for more advanced training that leads to “a better position for us to assist them in finding work.”
“We’re looking to reach out to a larger audience of people who have been considering potential careers in technology, and IT is one of the few areas of our economy that’s actually growing,” Masin said.
“It was very much motivated by some of the discussions going on in Washington and certainly the president’s speech,” Masin added. “As an organization, what can we say in response to that? How can we, as a state business, offer something that might be tangible other than saying, ‘We’re here’?”
In the company’s announcement, SetFocus founder and CEO Mike Landau said the company’s goal is to improve lives by “offering them the opportunity of employment stability and sustainability.”
More than 100 hours of training is available on the company’s website in the areas of object-oriented concepts, relational database fundamentals, business intelligence tools and SharePoint.
Masin said SetFocus is also offering portions of its Parsippany campus to business startups at reduced costs, with the idea that as these small companies grow, they will need IT support from those trained by SetFocus. Masin said there already is interest in the company’s space, and has positive participation from the Parsippany Chamber of Commerce and the Morris County Chamber of Commerce.
