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Victor’s passion for IT education stems from his love for programming and teaching. His management focus is hiring and supporting talented people who put the needs of customers first.
As ExitCertified has been acquired by Axcel, Victor is enthusiastic to work with like-minded people to build on ExitCertified’s strengths.
Victor’s team is working to develop a unified platform of applications that can enhance the customer experience and the efficiency of managing an Instructor-led training business.
Victor’s passion for IT was inspired by his mother who was one of the first female computer programmers. While obtaining a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 1958 at the University of Maryland, Carol Taylor took the university’s first computer programming course. Carol loved programming, and after graduating from college, she worked in computer science until she retired at age 70.
Carol encouraged all her children to follow in her footsteps. Victor began learning programming at age 12 and built his first large computer game at age 15. In college, he worked for a computer gaming company as a programmer on a World War II flight simulator. He had developed the same love for programming that his mother had and he saw it as a powerful tool to allow people to realize their visions and create solutions to problems.
Victor discovered his love for teaching when he was in high school. He belonged to an organization that encouraged elementary school students to pursue science. In groups of two, students would go to nearby elementary schools to teach science lessons. Victor would draw the students in by having them conduct science experiments. He enjoyed planning the lessons and experiments and watching the children’s faces as they comprehended new concepts.
Both teaching and computer programming gave him energy and satisfaction. When Victor started college, he thought he’d have to choose between IT and education for his career. In his final year of college studying computer science, he realized he couldn’t give up on his love for teaching. He got a job at an IT training school teaching Microsoft Word to office administrators. Although this was not his first choice of topics to teach, he felt good about helping non-technical students overcome their fear of computers and found his calling in education.
Three days after earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Victor started teaching C, C++, and other programming languages. The students typically had no experience working with computers. Whenever his students seemed to be perplexed, he would break the concepts down into pieces until he was sure they understood the material. Helping his students make that difficult transition to programming cemented his passion for helping people reach their educational goals.
Less than a year after joining the IT training school, he was promoted to Director of Education. In this role, Victor first saw the impact he could make managing a delivery business to support instructors and students. A year later, he left that technical training school to work at Sun Microsystems training IT professionals on a new programming language: Java.
While teaching Java as a contract instructor, Victor started teaching classes for ExitCertified as an independent contractor. He was so impressed with the talent and entrepreneurial spirit of ExitCertified’s team that he applied for a full-time position. He joined ExitCertified as a Java instructor in 2004, and six months later was promoted to his current position: Director of Operations.
Victor has built a team of education delivery professionals that manage all the logistics to ensure customers will have a great educational experience. His team supports an exceptional group of instructors with a shared passion for technology and education.
Over the last twenty years, the ExitCertified delivery team has evolved from teaching only Sun Microsystems technologies to teaching hundreds of courses on cloud and other cutting-edge technologies. Since then, the ExitCertified team has earned many awards for educational excellence from the industry.
Working as part of the Axcel team has been a pleasure because the company’s focus fits with our culture of focusing on quality education and customer success.
Throughout the pre-acquisition and post-acquisition process, Axcel expertly helped us navigate the challenges of decoupling our organization from our previous parent company. Axcel made the process as simple and low stress as possible.
For many years before the acquisition, ExitCertified had partnered with Accelebrate and Web Age to augment each other’s educational offerings.
Bringing our training offerings together under the Axcel umbrella has strengthened our businesses, and working together has helped us all overcome challenges in the IT training industry.
With my background in computer science, I have always enjoyed the part of my job that involves planning and overseeing the design of IT systems that manage our education business and support our customers. Working with Axcel, I love focusing on ways we can bring together the best parts of our IT systems to develop an outstanding instructor-led training platform to give customers the best educational experience.
