I did a degree in IT and in my third year went to work for HP in Germany as my year in industry.
I thought having HP on my cv would easily get me a job in IT.
But it didn't, and I was working for comet as a sales manager after uni.
then a friend applied for a company down south for a job as a 'Microsoft Business Account Manager', basically telesales for an IT reseller.
i thought, what the hell, I'll apply too, we both went to an open day there and had interviews, I got a job, he didn't (they took on 15, so there wasn't just one job), he never spoke to me again, and I landed a role doing telesales for Microsoft licensing, I am quite a passionate seller, but if I am interested in what I am selling, so storage, servers yes, Microsoft licensing, no. But at that time the company was most selling MS, about 80% of the business probably.
I did that for two years and would help the odd person when they were selling a server to spec it up etc. Then I decided to leave to get a more technical job, so I handed in my notice and left. 2 days later (and several job applications and interviews performed already) I got a call from the hr director asking me if I wanted to come back, as a presales person to help people spec the techie stuff, as they realised that I used to do a lot of it, and they were looking to sell more of it to diversify as there was talk MS were going to start selling direct and we kind of had all our eggs in one basket.
and it all started from there really, and 9 years later there are 6 presales guys, nearly 20 engineers to go out and install this stuff and MS only accounts for about 40% of our business now. I left presales (my baby) about 4 years ago now and became the first in house engineer.
This all came from getting a job there in telesales. When I started we had 70 employees and turnover was probably 20m, now 12 years later we have over 500 employees, 3 locations and a turnover well in excess of 300m, we won the sunday times best company to work for, and pretty much every award in the it reseller industry including the CRN reseller of the year 3 years running, so business is good and I am a part of the furniture now. I nearly left about 4-5 years ago, got headhunter by a company and offered a payrise of 50%, and I handed my notice in at Softcat, but they gave me a deal to stay, and it was the best thing I ever did. The company who offered me the job haven't faired well during the financial crisis, so I would have either lost my job or been at least constantly worried about losing it, and even though the Softcat deal didn't look as good on paper, with bonuses I earns more than I would have anyway.
So while leaving and trying something new like Chris above, can be a great thing and a new opportunity, it can sometimes pay you to stay with the devil you know, especially if they have the growth that Softcat have enjoyed. And getting a foot in the door as mentioned above is key and once you have that it's up to you to make your own destiny then and work your ass off to make it.
softcat are constantly recruiting, so if anyone lives in London, Manchester or near the m4/40 corridor, then think about applying, we take on tech grads and do a scheme where we put you in various roles in the tech teams to see how you do and whether you'd be better at internal IT work in our managed service cloud provider business or maybe presales, or like me an engineer on customer sites.
I would offer to help someone out, but the last person I tried to help out on here, and actually got them an interview had to rearrange as they couldn't make the interview at the last minute, and then they were given a second place at our open day/interview and got the date wrong and didnt turn up, so quite frankly I was made to look a tit for recommending someone
if I can be of any other assistance though, let me know.
oh and I think I started out on 12k, my aim was always to earn my age in thousands, which I accomplished fairly early on. I'm doing ok now through a lot of hard work.
