I find it somewhat odd that I've landed on Sajha to ask questions related to my career, but here I am anyways.  I value different perspectives; things that are not obvious to me may be obvious to some folks here, so here it goes:
Just to give you my background, I am just about to finish my PhD (in hard science not experimental, other than CS). Natural next step for people in my field is to apply for postdoc positions, which I did apply for, and ended up getting an offer, but I decided not pursue this line of work for a variety of reasons--very low salary being one of them.  Let us now not dwell on why I want to go a different route and did not think about all  this when I started. That is past, and I have moved on and have no regrets. 

I have  looked for jobs in industries as well, but positions at good places are difficult to land on, and most of the open positions require heavy duty computational work, which I am not well versed in. I do have some background but my experience and expertise are certainly not at the level that many industrial folks desire. 

So I want to start small, which of course does not mean that I want to go back to school and get a degree. I am comfortable programming in C or Python, have  experience in scientific computing and numerical methods. But I don't know a squat about Java or any other computing paradigms relevant in today's computing/programming job market.

Of late I have been hearing a lot about consulting companies (run by Indians?) who hire and train people and help them find relevant computing/programming jobs.  Sorry for being naive here, but is this  baloney, or is it a real deal? Do you think this would be the right way going forward for me, if nothing else works out?

I am simply trying to weigh in my options here and wanted to make sure that I am not missing out on anything. 


Any helpful advice will be appreciated, but please refrain from making derogatory statements.
 
Thanks.

What is your major?

You can go for CS/IT. PhD in sociology, biology, history, math, eng etc is gud fit for Computer science/IT job.

Why dont you go for System Administration (Linux)? You already know C/python that helps you for scripting.

With hard core science background, you can learn RedHat (or free version of it "CentOS" linux) by yourself. Add basic knowledge of VMWare on the top of that. There is good job market and good pay.

 hello there,

With my best knowledge for a profile of your kind who doesnt have an IT background, reporting tools / datawarehousing tools like Business Intelligence, Business Objects, or Crystal reports would be an ideal option to step with.  These are the tools which gets you an confidence, towards leading everything comes on your way with a succes at the initial days itself.  Later you would have enough room to switch over to development side if interested. But making a decent money with this move is guaranteed.

our company is reknown for it and you may reach me at nalini769@gmail.com

Looks like you are an excellent candidate for Data scientist.  SInce you are already familiar with C and Python, and also looks like you have tremendous background on applied Statistics and mathematics, it won't be hard for you to pick up on R or similar platform.

Forget about other IT fields, these days companies can easily find sys admins , BI developers and so on...and after few years in these fields, you'll be bored.

But they're struggling to fulfill the Data Scientist position. (It's not the same as Data analyst). Check out the payscale compared to other IT fields.


http://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century/

 Thanks for all your comments. Sorry if I was not clear in my earlier post, but I am not a Statistician/Biologist/Sociologist as some of you implied here. My undergrad major was in Mathematics, but I switched field in graduate school.
I am aware of these other job options mentioned by a few of the posters above, but my major concern is that I do not have necessary background to get my foot in the door because I come from a different field. When I say I have knowledge of C and Python, I only meant that I can do scientific numerical computations (Partial Diff Eqs, Monte Carlo etc. nothing too fancy. I am not making any softwares or games!) with those langugages, but I am definitely not an expert, not even close. 

 When you look at job descriptions for some of the positions mentioned above--especially the Data Scientist--they clearly say I must either have formal education or work experience in Java, data mining/machine learning, AI etc., which I have none. Is it really enough to "learn things on my own" in order to get my foot in the door? I can certainly learn these on my own, but I am not quite convinced that this will help me get noticed (of course, I won't get anywhere if I don't learn, but that's not the point here), because I am not involved in nay projects, and frankly, I woundn't be able to get any thing done before I graduate, which is happening soon. I guess, what I am looking for is a place where I can start small since I've *some* programming background, work as well as learn, and not simply spend time learning on my own with no concrete results.  Is this feasible at all, or am I just day dreaming?

Thanks for your input. Please keep'em coming!

@ Nalini, I will try to get in touch with you.

Dude, to work in IT high school degree is enough. You will find lots of ppl with high school diploma.

You have a phd and are you ready to consider high school guy your boss?