|
Moving At The Speed Of Byte
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2th, 1998
Home News Tribune
High-tech School Readies Workers for the Future
By Jeffrey Cohen
Correspondent
Edison---- Zafar Khizer married his wife four days after he met her,
so it shouldn’t come as surprise that his business, PC Age, is
growing so quickly. Zafar does things fast.
Business Profile
PC Age is a school for people who want to learn specific skills to
market themselves in the high tech field, where demand in New Jersey
is acute but qualified applicants are in short supply. Computer
networking routinely ranks among the most desirable career choices.
The 38 year old Zafar is fond of saying that his students earn an
average of $40,000 when they leave the course, which can last from
six months to nine months and cost up to $7,000. He also says that
among the students who have completed his courses and passed three
or more Microsoft certification tests, he has a 100-percent
placement rate.
The business brought in about $1.2 million 1997, and Zafar expects
that he will do about $3million in 1998. He jokes that his biggest
problem right now is how to handle growth.
Zafar came to the United States in 1985 from Pakistan where he had
earned a master’s degree in electronics, determined to get a
master’s degree in computer science, but intending to return to his
native country once he got his degree. A few things got in the way.
“The educational opportunities were in this country,” he explains in
PC Age’s Edison office, one of the two in New Jersey. “I saw that
what I wanted to do was here.”
After getting his master’s from the New Jersey Institute of
Technology in 1988, Zafar went to work for a Cedar Grove company,
setting up its computer system and networking its computers.
But he was restless. In 1992 he began consulting on computers with
other companies, and soon left his job to consult full time.
Still he was having trouble finding clients and explaining his
expertise. “I had no idea about advertising or marketing,” he says.
“It’s a big mistake to think everyone is your customer; you have to
understand who needs what you do.”
Eventually, Zafar, who had taught science to students when he was
living in Pakistan, realized that education was his first love. By
combining it with his new found computer training, he created PC
Age.
“I can explain things in a way that people understand,” he says. “I
take a very difficult topic and make it very simple.”
He began by teaching basic networking privately, and had six
students taking two-night courses for which Zafar charged $70.
In preparing to teach networking, Zafar read the existing manuals on
Novell and Microsoft operations and found they were difficult to
understand. Instead of writing a letter to the publishing company,
he wrote a better manual. Since then, he has written 16 other
instruction books, and they are being used by New York University
and the Chubb Institute, among other places.
In the beginning, writing books and teaching at the same time became
a little hectic. Zafar remembers writing a chapter out in long hand,
then giving it to an assistant to type, and going to teach a class.
“They would print out the chapter, and I’d be teaching, and they
would bring in the chapter while I was doing that to give to the
students,” he remembers, laughing. “That’s how fast it was going.”
And his business is expanding at a rapid pace as well.
PC Age moved from the 200 square feet Zafar had originally rented to
a 1,000-square –foot office then one twice that size within a month.
He was in a 7,200-square-foot facility in Fairfield when he opened
PC Age II in Edison in 1995, and the 3,800 square feet here was
recently expanded by about 3,000 feet.
“I think very soon, we’ll need more,” Zafar says.
There are 24 full- and part-time employees in the company, and about
10 in Edison, in addition to eight consultants. But there will be
far more employees if Zafar’s plan to franchise PC Age all over the
world takes hold. He says that within two years, he hopes to be
offering franchises, and is on his way to making PC Age an
international company, already talking with someone in Pakistan
about beginning a training facility there.
The current glut of high tech jobs, and the relative lack of trained
individuals to fill them, has contributed greatly to Zafar’s
success. He cites a Wall Street Journal estimate that there are
190,000 vacant jobs in the United States in the information
technology field, and that college enrollment in that area is down
50 percent. This, says Zafar, can only help a company trying to
train people to fill those positions, and doing nothing else.
“This is the best time for anyone who wants to change careers,” he
says “Even if you’re making $60,000 a year in a business that you
think is dying, you can change to this field and be making more than
that within a year.”
It is that dedication to a specific goal, certification by Novell
and Microsoft, that makes PC Age unique in its mission. Zafar’s
approach, not surprisingly, is to be fast.
“This is very fast-paced and hands-on education,” he explains.
“We’re not wasting their time trying to teach them so many different
things. This is very focused training.”
|
