【From Software Engineer to Career Consultant】
Part 2: It Takes All Kinds to Make a World
If the job of a Technical Marketing Engineer opened a new door for me in the career, then my transition into the sales organization three years later completely broadened my horizons and elevated me to a whole new level. It was a crucial turning point in my entire career.
Cisco’s Global Sales organization is an independent, complete, and massive operating machine. CEO John Chambers, who led Cisco to its prosperity, came from a sales background himself. He placed great importance on sales and business, from the front end to the back end, from customer sales skills to the mastery of product knowledge.
During my 10 years at Cisco, transitioning from R&D in the technical department to system integration marketing, and finally entering this complex sales organization—having come full circle, I dare say the effort and resources the company poured into sales far exceeded any other areas.
The reason I made this transition was that during my time as a Technical Marketing Engineer, besides working in the lab and at trade shows, we frequently had to give presentations and training to the Systems Engineers (Sales Engineers), training them for the latest technical knowledge. Because my team was a system-level technology team (rather than a single product), we had a very tight-knit relationship with these Systems Engineers who faced practical issues on the front lines. Although they belonged to the sales organization, they still held the title of engineer because they also had technical backgrounds, but had to carry sales quotas and directly face all sorts of demands and difficult challenges from clients.
Within Cisco’s sales organization, there was a large department specifically dedicated to the competency training and career advancement of sales talent. My third job was under this department, serving as a Program Manager for global sales force enablement programs.
At that time, Cisco had a total of 11 technology groups across the entire company, so our enablement and training programs were divided according to these tracks. There were 11 programs in total, and each program had hundreds of sales engineers under it. The technology group I was responsible for—the very field I had consistently specialized in since my days in R&D—was Unified Communication. This encompassed all communication-related applications built on foundational network systems, including the technical integration of IP telephony, video conferencing, instant messaging, and immersive meetings (TelePresence). Back in 2006, this was a highly important and newly emerging topic. At that time, this technology group was the largest, most visible, and most populated among Cisco’s 11 technology groups. I had to manage the training and development of over 1,000 sales engineers from five continents and more than 80 countries. Compared to my colleagues who managed relatively smaller technology tracks such as routing & switching, wireless, security, etc., my visibility was significantly higher, and the pressure was multiplied several times over. Furthermore, I was the only Asian in the entire department whose native language was not English. Coupled with the highly aggressive, even cutthroat work culture of the sales organization, the learning and growth I experienced under the tremendous pressure in those few short years were beyond comparison with my previous two jobs.
A Program Manager is responsible for handling long-term program strategies and success metrics. Our tasks included defining success objectives and metrics every six months, formulating and executing various projects to help achieve these metrics, and supervising and coordinating numerous matters. Besides managing the project managers, instructional designers, training teams, and competency analysts under me, I spent most of my time meeting, coordinating, and communicating with regional sales directors and their superiors worldwide. I needed to understand the needs of these thousands of sales engineers, helping them perform better, generate more revenue, and continue their professional development.
It was in this job, through interacting with people from top to bottom, left to right—people of all kinds, with different job roles, at different levels, and from different national cultures, regions, and races—that I felt my innate curiosity, observation, and insight into people were finally triggered and unlocked.
Having to coordinate and communicate daily with hundreds of people from different places and job positions, I deeply realized just how uniquely different each person is. The way they think is different, their approaches of doing things are different, the basis on which they make decisions is different, the way they express themselves is different, and the things they want to pursue are different. I realized that interpersonal interactions can take many forms, and there are many different ways to achieve work goals.
However, if you focus too much on individual uniqueness, you lose efficiency. It was during management training that I was introduced to MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), which left a deep impression on me as a convenient and practical tool. It effectively grasps a person’s primary traits from inner thinking to outward behavior, and going a step further, it helps understand their underlying driving forces. It not only helped me communicate with different people but also showed me how to motivate these more than a thousand sales engineers who each had different motivational needs.
Aside from the pressure stemming from the organizational culture, I actually enjoyed the content of my work very much. This job opened my reach and understanding of people. Two years later, when I was headhunted by another company and decided to leave Cisco, I received an overwhelming amount of feedback in the farewell emails. Many sales engineers told me that out of all the program managers they had worked with over the years, I was the most approachable, the most thoughtful of and attentive to their needs, and the most influential.
I left Cisco with a heart full of gratitude as well as a complex feeling of not ready to say good-bye. Over my ten years there, I transformed from an engineer who would only sit in front of a computer writing code or doing tests in the lab into an capable manager who had interacted with hundreds of people on daily basis and achieved demanding business goals.
<to be continued>
