ACE Tech Resources has placed MultiValue developers for 35 years. We built the Academy because our clients ran out of people to hire. Employer partners get first look at candidates who have been trained on a live UniVerse system, tested in front of a panel, and — by the time you meet them — have already worked four weeks inside a production MultiValue shop.
You have decades of business rules living in Pick BASIC that nobody has written down anywhere else. The developers who know where those rules are have been the reason the system is trusted — and they're retiring faster than you can replace them. The market response has been to pay more for the same shrinking pool. That is not a pipeline.
The Academy is a pipeline. It takes adults with business sense and no programming background, trains them for a year on a live UniVerse system, tests each credential in front of a panel that includes an employer, puts them inside a real shop for four weeks, and hands them to our recruiting desk with a portfolio attached.
Chapters 47–48 are entirely about reading and safely extending legacy code. Apprentices are told: no changes in the first week.
Every week opens with a business scenario. Learners are selected for business-systems experience — order desks, pharmacies, dispatch — not prior coding.
Volume 4 covers REST via Rocket MVIS, Uniface front ends over U2, Git, and "never a technology break" modernization strategy.
Credentials are awarded on a milestone project presented to the instructor and an employer-partner assessor — not on finishing the reading.
| Credential | What they've demonstrated | What you can hand them |
|---|---|---|
| Week 13Certified MultiValue Foundationsenters candidate pool | Navigate a live U2 account; model a domain into files and dictionaries; write TCL queries and formatted reports; basic Pick BASIC with the read-modify-write pattern. | Support and operations roles: query and report requests, data fixes under supervision, first-line application support. |
| Week 26Certified MultiValue Developerplacement-ready | A multi-program business application: menus, entry screens, reports, subroutines, record locking, transactions, validation, error handling, code standards, and a full test plan — demonstrated live. | Junior developer work: maintenance tickets, new reports and screens, small features, test plans on existing programs. |
| Week 39Certified Full-Stack MultiValue Integrator | A Uniface application bound to live UniVerse data; secondary indexes and query performance; advanced data modelling; batch processing and transaction design; developer-level system administration. | Front-end modernization on U2, performance work, batch and month-end processes, and the pieces of your stack nobody under 55 currently touches. |
| Week 52Academy Diploma | REST endpoints with Rocket MVIS, consuming external APIs from Pick BASIC, Git, agile practice, a supervised apprenticeship with a written employer evaluation, and an original full-stack capstone presented at Demo Day. | A developer who has already worked in a production MultiValue environment and can lead a small modernization initiative — an API, a Uniface form — with senior oversight. |
Each role has its own short agreement, and each one gives you an earlier look at the candidates than the open market ever will.
Weeks 46–49. One learner, matched to your platform, inside your shop for four weeks under a senior developer.
Weeks 13, 26, 39, 52. Watch candidates present and defend real work; score them on a rubric; tell us what the curriculum is missing.
Open a job order and we submit credentialed candidates with milestone scores, apprenticeship evaluation, and portfolio attached — from Week 26 on.
Sponsor your own people. Have an ops analyst, a support tech, or a report writer who already knows your business? Put them through the Academy on an employer-sponsored seat — $16,000 tuition, $4,000 per credential level, invoiced to you — and they come back a developer who already knows your data. The apprenticeship happens in your own shop.
The workbook's thesis: what predicts success isn't prior coding, it's understanding the business, respecting the architecture that's kept the system running, and the discipline to change things carefully. Admissions selects for that.
Labs run on a live UniVerse account against the Wychbooks wholesale-bookstore database — customers, titles, orders, suppliers — not toy examples.
UniVerse/UniData, Uniface, and MVIS, taught by a Rocket solutions partner. Chapter 27 hands learners to Rocket's own Uniface eLearning.
Fifty-two portfolio artifacts, four milestone scores, and a host employer's written evaluation. You can open all of it before the first interview.
ACE Tech Resources is a specialist recruiting and workforce-development firm focused exclusively on the Pick MultiValue ecosystem. Roy Contreras, its president, has spent more than 35 years placing MultiValue developers with companies across North America — and watching the same conversation repeat as a generation of experts retires.
The Academy's 52-chapter curriculum was written for exactly that problem, with a foreword by Dawn Wolthuis of Tin Cat Group and the Wychbooks demo database by Brian Leach.
"If you are an employer partner: the graduates of this program have been trained to the standard your systems deserve."
Dawn Wolthuis, President, Tin Cat Group — from the foreword to the Academy workbookLess than you'd think. The curriculum is taught on UniVerse; the data model, TCL, dictionaries, and Pick BASIC carry straight over, and we match apprentices to hosts by platform so a UniData shop gets a learner briefed on the differences before day one. D3 and jBASE shops: talk to us — the fundamentals transfer, the tooling differs more.
Whatever your supervising developer decides, within the Academy's rules: nothing in week one but reading and questions; after that, changes only with the supervisor's approval, in a test or development account where you have one, with a documented change record and test plan. Apprentices sign confidentiality terms and may not remove anything from your environment except portfolio material you approve in writing.
Your call. Most MultiValue work is remote-capable and most apprentices are matched remotely; on-site placements work well where you have a local learner. We ask about location and remote preference at application and match accordingly.
No. Hosting is a four-week working interview with no obligation on either side. If you do want to hire them, you get first refusal, and [host placement-fee terms].
Two to three hours online per milestone: watch presentations, ask questions, score a rubric we provide. Most assessors say it's the most useful thing they do all quarter — you see a whole cohort's work, and the curriculum changes based on what you tell us.
On the open market you're bidding against everyone else for the same 30-year veterans. Here you're looking at people who have been trained on your stack for a year, tested in front of an employer four times, evaluated by a host, and who arrive with a portfolio you can read. And you saw them first.
Tell us what you run, how big the team is, and what you'll need to hire in the next 12–18 months. Send the inquiry and you'll land on Roy's calendar; the partner brief follows by email the same day.
Tell us what you run and what you'll need to hire. We'll send the partner brief and take you straight to Roy's calendar.
Rather skip the form? Book a 30-minute discovery call or email Roy. We follow up within one business day. No newsletter.