From a primary school dropout, to a full-fledged software engineer, Tanveer Mohammed has landed his dream job

Bengaluru, February 6

Mohammed Tanveer from Bengaluru, who has clinched a job with Influx Worldwide as a software engineer with a salary package of ₹7.5 lakh per annum, has traversed a long, arduous, and continuous learning path to get here.

He clinched the job after enlisting at Masai School, a military-style coding school, which is on a mission to find untapped or underutilised talent, where he was trained on full-stack software development from 9am to 9pm, six days a week for 24 weeks. The course consists of 1,200 hours of coding, 100 hours of soft skills and 100 hours of building mathematical abilities. Besides this, the course also offers 20 guest lectures, two demo days, two hackathons, 20 projects, 100 challenges and 10 mock interviews.

While at Masai School, Tanveer also built a browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox. He was rewarded with an invitation to Google’s Bengaluru office for the Google Chrome Developer Summit.

A Class V school dropout, Tanveer was forced to drop out when his father’s business crashed, to join his uncle’s fabrication workshop as a welder where he earned a paltry ₹50 per week. The shop had to shut down as it was caught employing child labour. He joined another fabrication workshop as helper to a welder for ₹120 a week and left four years later skilled as a welder to join another workshop where he made ₹500 a week. An accident at the workshop proved to be the turning point in his life, when he decided to make it big in life, someday.

“Companies today are seeing the value of skills over degrees, which will open up more opportunities for aspirants like Tanveer. Having the right skills is key in building a job-ready workforce. And with emerging technologies, we need more people who are ready to adapt to the changes with skill-sets that they can deploy as soon as they get into the job. Even Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, said he doesn’t care if a candidate hasn’t cleared high school,” said Prateek Shukla, co-founder and CEO, Masai School, which began operations in June 2019.

The Masai School follows the ISA (income sharing agreement) model where students don’t have to pay a fee upfront when enrolling for the programme, but have to pay when they get a job with a salary of more than ₹6 lakh per annum.

“Candidates have to sign an ISA where they end up paying 15 per cent of their salary for the first three years of their employment to cover the training fee, capped at ₹3 lakh,” said Shukla.

Talking about his journey Tanveer said, “After the accident, I spent three months at home with nothing to do. My sister who was then studying medical transcription inspired me to learn to read and write English. I later enrolled for a typing course which helped me land a job as a data entry executive; from there I moved to other data entry jobs where I earned ₹4,500 to ₹6,500 a month and worked my way up to becoming an SEO (search engine optimisation) specialist."

His last job before enrolling at Masai School was at Adspoton Online Services, as Digital Marketing Manager earning ₹80,000 a month. “Initially, I was apprehensive about beginning a career as a coder without an educational degree. This was when I discovered Masai School on Twitter and enrolled for the programme,” recalls Tanveer. Asked why he had accepted a cut in salary with Influx Worldwide, Tanveer said, “I was hell bent on becoming a software developer, so I didn’t mind the salary cut. More importantly, the Masai programme has empowered me with the right skills and has kick-started my career as a full-stack software developer.”

COMMENT NOW