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.