As a technical person, it took me an embarrassing length of time to understand MARKETING IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS.

Perhaps you have developed some very good business software. You need to COMMUNICATE that to an audience of prospective customers. Perhaps you have very beneficial improvements to software you have already installed. You need to SELL that to your existing clients.

It seems you have fallen into the trap of a lot of technical people (myself included) in thinking that your products will sell themselves on technical value alone. That never works. To advance a business Marketing and Sales are more important than technical excellence, sorry to say.

 

I feel like that no one is using my talents and it's getting wasted day by day... What you do if feel like this...

Which should be done Here?
Self Advertisement
Or
Self Control!

Do not give up.

Quitting is the biggest mistake people can make when struggling to bring about a change in their lives. I will tell you a little about me to give some perspective, apologies if this seems long winded but it might give some perspective on how I once felt hopeless.

I grew up fatherless in poverty in Liverpool in the 1960s, raised by my mother and grandmother, an aunt also shared our two room home and later two younger sisters. We lived downstairs in a house along with three other families and all families shared one bathroom, we did at least also have an outside toilet for our exclusive use, we were dirt poor basically and no prospect of that ever changing.

I found solace in books, especially science and space books, I slowly learned basic science from such books, my mother encouraged this, she was pleased that I was absorbed in books and playing with broken machines because it was so easy back then to drift into petty crime and bring the police to the door, thankfully I never did that to my mother and I know it was a real fear she harboured.

When I was about nine she ordered a set of children's encyclopedias and these all came at once one day, four huge (to me) boxes (5 books per box) of red hardback books, so much in them, I would thumb through them randomly sometimes just looking at the pictures and was very absorbed by the section "Things to make and do".

I watched the Apollo moon project and landing, I was 11 when they landed and by that time was known as that "clever kid" not that I was clever but I did know all about stuff that most people didn't and I loved understanding stuff.

I became determined to use my interest in machines and science to somehow become a real "scientist" like the heros I read about in books (too many namesto list but I'm sure we all had a list at that age). Eventually, aged about 14, I accidentally got intersted in electronics by having a class friend show me how he made a radio, I was absolutely stunned.

He brought some components in that he had bought - resisters, caps, veroboard and stuff - and I chatted with him, saying that I'd seen these things in old radios that I used to break up and play with, I'd had no idea what they were and to then look inside old radios and know what these things were called was kind of like secret knowledge, not that I understood any of it!

I later started a two year full time college program in electronics and telecommunications, very good material at least the first year of a degree but coupled with a lot of practical stuff for industry like motors, types of motors, codes for installing wiring in factories, three phase, insulation resistance testing and much more, also microcomputers too.

After that finished I could not get work, tried and tried and tried, interviews here and there, nothing, I had no real degree and so couldn't approach jobs that asked for that, I regret not trying to apply for some of those "degree jobs" too but I drew the line because I felt I was not part of that elite group.

I'd already written several articles for well known electronics magazines, I started to feel that nobody was willing to take a hiring risk, my experiences were depressing, in all the books I read the inventors and engineers had always gotten a break, some job came up that got them on the ladder, but not me, no matter what I tried, no matter I had very good grades, no matter I was polite and respectful, no matter I had a little portfolio of magazines to impress, the results were always the same, nobody was interested.

This was now the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was running the country and treating the working class terribly, places like Liverpool in the old industrial north of the UK were being decimated by factories closing, thousands being laid off, getting a job suddenly became even more difficult, grown men couldn't feed their families, had no prospects of getting work in jobs using the skills they had.

I decided to just drop out for a while, I stopped looking for jobs, I received a small government allowance (every one out of work who could show they had been trying to get work, was entitled to a few pounds a week, I had plenty of rejection letters so I was "in"). I live with my mother, gave her most of my social security money and used the rest to just get by personally.

I hado to visit an unemployment office every week and sign a declaration (that I was not secretly working and had earned no money) in order to get that weekly check in the mail.

I wrote a few more articles for Electronics Today International (on robots and stuff) in like 1981 and although I got paid like 60 pounds at the time, it was a lot of money back then. Declaring these ocassional payments to the unemployment office would be suicide too, if I had done that I'd be mired in complex bureacracy going forward, those social systems are not setup to handle that kind of thing well and it would have resulted in me not getting paid by them, needing to prove I was not actually employed, needing to show bank statements and so on and so forth.

After a year of just living free, reading lots, learning lots but still seeing no hope of a job, even outside of Liverpool, I stumbled upon a computer programming training course, paid for by the government (you gave up your social security payment and got paid a bit more for attending the training). This lasted 14 weeks and led to me getting interviews as a trainee programmer, at that time programming was starting to take off and there was a huge shortage of trained programmers (contrast with today where everyone is now a programmer).

I put everything into these interviews and realized that with my solid knowledge of microprocessors as well as my new training as a mainfranme programmer I was at last, possibly, matybee going to get a real paying job and eventually I did, in London, summer 1982 and although I had to leave my home town, many friends and so on, it was the right choice, and that set my path - not in electronics as I had once dreamed - but in programming and despite not being my true passion I did learn to enjoy it and escape the unemployment trap, albeit after several fruitless years and umpteen rejections.

So never give up, reach out to people, cold call, try the unlikely options, prove you are the best candidate for the job, help the interviewers, ask them during the interviews about their own challenges at work, the problems they face, don't just confine an inteview to the narrow role itself.

Find out what they need, their actual problem, understand their world, their challenges - I've done this at inteviews every time for the past thity years, I ask them a lot of questions, get them to share their real worries and concerns and gradually show them that I am not just saying "hire me I'm great" but "I'd love to help solve, that, love to contribute ideas to this like XXX".

When you start talking about their problems they will often unwittingly help yopu get the job!

 

Never give up