How Nikhil, a guy who had <60% in his education became one of the finest gem at Vidhya Skill School Cohort 4?
Sometimes individuals are very hard working but lack opportunities and are assessed by their community or peers. Then they start questioning their abilities to acquire a job!
Something similar I have seen when I met Nikhil Nalande(LinkedIn) to join our Vidhya Skill School Cohort 4 via LinkedIn. We were new and he joined us based on mutual friend trust. We had no website or information to show people and we grew organically with no promotion.
We went out to him and sought to understand his perspective, as we were following a standard and straightforward procedure for the examination. We began with our assessment (1 week assignment).
Post-assignment we went through with
- Analysis of talent & passion
- Logic, zeal, and synergy to change his life
I still recall joining the interview call. He calls me on video,
Hello Ankit, how are you doing?”
I was like, is he an American?
He had a wonderful accent. So, after a brief introduction, I asked him the same. I’m from Dhule in Maharashtra. I smiled and said “Hello Nikhil”.
Later we started with his flight search assignment evaluation shared using GitHub. We were happy & impressed after seeing his style of code, curiosity & open to learn attitude. Out of curiosity I started checking his old code repos & found interesting code & his work.
I asked him a lot of questions & evaluated him on a lot of parameters & found him an interesting aspirant & decided to go ahead with him. Hence accepted his application.
Later we kickoff our session & started working with him. We have all of internal softwares access & asked him to update on a regular basis. He started doing each & everything with full dedication & was also active during our regular session, discord & daily status meetings. My other #Cohort3 mentors reached out to me & shared his curiosity & performance report with me.
We were surprised 😯 to see like how a 2018 passed out engineer who never worked in the industry is performing so well & working & behaving like a 4–5 years of experienced engineer.
We asked everyone to showcase their work over their network & maintain their portfolio, since the kind of Design & UI which was creating was mind blowing. One day he suddenly called me & asked,
Ankit bhai, connect kare kya… Mereko thoda review karana hai design mera aapse.
I said, yeah let’s do it & then the game started. He shared his screen & i was like Bhai, dikha to kya banaya hai tune, he replied…are Ankit bhai, yahi hai to banaya hai. Ye mene hi CSS se banaya hai Netflix
This was my expression
He showcased me his few designs & UI
He also wrote an amazing detailed medium article to share his skillset with everyone
Later we started our demo days where all our aspiring engineers built popular application clones of Flipkart Engineering, Hotstar, SwiggyBytes, LinkedIn, Netflix, Google & a lot more on a weekly basis. Every week we were inviting founders, leads, hiring manager, technology experts & leaders to visit our aspirants demo’s.
I still remember that day when we invited Javed Memon, Co-founder of Fintify visited us to review Hotstar UI Clone demo & he liked Nikhil’s & Arun’s demo & shortlisted them for consideration.
Well, Arun is also a magician & our next level engineer, a super-talent who can learn and master anything… We’ll talk about his superpower in another article else you’ll fall in love with him.
Post that week, we did a lot of demo’s, where Nikhil built a lot of apps.
He completed all our assigned tasks on time & rigorously worked on himself for DSA & started building own apps for gaining experience.
We successfully completed 4 month’s & one day i received a call from him & he was really happy & said
Ankit bhai, ho gaya mera ek company me, wo mere ko pune ya Nashik ka option de rahe hai. Mene pucha, khush hai tu bhai…he said, are Ankit bhai 3 saal baad koi job aayi hai…warna me to kesa ho gaya tha aap jante hi ho or gahrwale bhi mere itne khush hai ki kya batau.
His happiness touched my heart & i myself started dipped into tears when one of my hard working & skilled aspirant is getting his first job also the first job of Cohort 4. I was unable to control my feelings & asked him “Bhai bata kya karna hai bol”.
He sweetly replied, “Ankit, bhai aap batao, jo kahoge karunga, aapko bata nahi sakta ki kya chal raha hai dimag mai yaha.
I asked about the salary & asked him, are you happy with this number? He mentioned “Kum to hai, kyuki waha jana padega to itne me kese parvadega(chalega) mereko. But Ankit bhai, samhaj nahi aaraha kya karu. Gharwale bole Ankit bhai se baat karo or unse hi pucho, wahi sahi batayenge.
Later i asked him to decide & gave him all possible pros & cons & let him decide the rest. Suddenly i got a call from one of my another rockstar i.e. Akash, one of my gem of Cohort 3 (We’ll talk about him later, since he’ll steal the entire show if i started speaking about him 😬)
Akash said, kya hua Ankit bhai, bahut mixed si feelings me lag rahe ho? Then i shared everything to him. He smiled & said, mereko number bhejo Nikhil ka mai baat karta hai bhai se.
He called Nikhil & shared his entire story & said a single statement after hearing everything.
Don’t settle, keep hustling & you deserve better for your & for your loved once or agar mai kar sakta hu to tu to aag hi laga dega.
Later after half an hour Nikhil called me & said, Ankit bhai…mai ready hai risk lene ke liye. Let’s do it & now i’ll give my 200% to land my dream job. Then he started giving his best & also helped a lot of people in my Cohorts to grow & solving their problems. Just with in 12–15 days i got a call from Javed & he said.
Ankit Jain, My supercharge team is open & I’m looking for Frontend, FullStack, and Mobile engineers. Do you have a team? He answered before I could speak.
I noticed Nikhil and Arun’s outstanding work and really liked them. A bright career awaits excellent individuals, he says. So, because I knew Javed and his team for 3–4 years, I said yes, let’s do it.
Next week they arrived with their panel and reviewed both of them, and guess what? Nikhil contacted me and I could sense his joy in his eyes through a video conversation on Meet. His whole family is ecstatic and congratulated him.
He joined them & works like a rocket ship with them with his full potential. I routinely connects with Javed & he defined that he’s really pleased & an exceptional engineer haven’t seen before. His feedback is superb & helping them growing like crazy.
Checkout Nikhil’s Profile
If anyone says that a fresher can’t do anything or need a lot of handholding then ask him to write me an email at ankit@vidhyaskillschool.com & i’ll let them experience something with our aspirants which they haven’t seen before.
We’ve realised that the sector has excellent talent waiting for proper guidance.
We’re not here to sell, but to mentor ambitious engineers realise their potential and find the ideal company for them.
In addition, our Cohort 6 applications is up and taking applications for Frontend, Backend, FullStack, Mobile & DevOps with AWS.
There are many more things we have done at Vidhya Skill School, stay tuned to get more updates 🤩
