What are a few jobs at your company that I probably have never heard of?

Well it may be something I do for a living Dan! I am a Strategist for my company covering Emerging Markets. This role does three things:
1. Evangelizing what the company strategy is, our focus, and be the face of the company in front of Press, conferences, and industry speaking engagements.

2. I also work on building what our company calls our Channel Partnerships, which is a focus for us to scale beyond just being able to sell solutions directly. Our channel help us position our solutions and are the extended team for our company but do require a lot of training.
3. I work with the top CIOs and executive management in our customers to make them aware of the cyber threats that exist in the industry and help them be prepared, focus on protecting themselves, and work on a plan so they can Detect, Respond, and Recover from cyber attacks. This is usually done through a multi-year focused strategy that I help architect with them jointly over the course of a few months.

Some teams that I often work with and never knew about in college are:

Process Improvement: Work on projects to help teams improve the way they do their jobs to get them done faster and cheaper

Change Management: Help leaders implement big changes in their organizations by helping them understand the needs of employees as they experience a change.

Modeling: Use math and computer skills to predict performance, understand trends and make product / pricing decisions

One piece of advice I often give undergraduate students is that 5 years after you graduate, you will probably be in a job that you don't know exists today. Think about the types of work you enjoy - math, problem solving, design / art. Focus on learning those skills and then be open to whatever opportunities come your way!

Hi Dan! When I graduated college, I was not immediately sure what to do either! I then found out about contract positions - where you work as a vendor for a company for a certain amount of time, gain experience, and learn about the company. This was ultimately how I landed in the job I have today! I learned so much doing contract work and gained so much experience. I learned what I liked to work on, and what I didn't like as much.

Best of luck!

Hi Dan,
I'm in Business Architecture which is a team that plays a critical role in ensuring the company makes decisions that are in line with our future vision. We work very closely with various business areas to ensure our business processes are accurately represented and all the information is available for senior leadership to make important decisions - this includes creating a vision, aligning to objectives and creating a strategy. If you like big-picture thinking, a challenging environment and an industry with a lot of opportunity ... check out Business Architecture.

Hope this helps!

This is a great question! I work in technology and we have a very large sales force that is responsible for delivering a lot of revenue to the bottom line. So we have operations team members partnered with sales teams to improve the process of selling.

Sales Operations: Making it easier for sales to sell by reducing time spent on administrative tasks like placing and tracking orders. It involves tools, process improvement and project management to streamline the operational engine supporting sales.

Business Operations: Like sales operations but focused on general business, think order processing, customer care, central reporting and analytics groups, etc.

Hi Dan!

I work in the Technology Industry, and have a Social Media Training job. You may or may not correlate a Tech giant to Social Media, but the role is important. My career is based on teaching employees in the industry how to use social media for business, personal connection, and promotion. And I'm not the only one - there are many Social Media jobs out there at many different companies. Which may or may not surprise you, but the sky is the limit!

Product manager: administer new products through every stage of definition and delivery.
Marketing manager: use your product expertise to define marketing tools and activities that enable sales people to be more productive.
Competitive intelligence specialist: find out information on your competitors products and plans.
Product owner: provide market expertise and business priorities to a product development team.
Quality assurance lead: test products to identify defects in engineering, particularly those that occur under abnormal circumstances.
Sales engineer (or sales consultant): support individual sales people with product expertise including presentations and product demonstrations.

Hi Dan,

I never thought Technology companies had any jobs except engineers and manager and HRs but after joining corporate there are so many more positions that one can explore in technology companies.

Technical Marketing Positions

Various position in technical sales. Systems architect. Sales expert. etc.

Customer Success positions like Customer success manager etc.

Site Reliability Engineer and much more. IF you want to see more try checking job posting sites and you will find all these different positions at different companies and the skill sets needed for them.

Hope it helps.

Hi Dan!
I recommend that you go to your local college or library and take a career assessment quiz. You will find a lot of careers you never thought of that will also best suit your skill set and interests. I did this when I was in college and it gave me ideas of where to focus my studies and what jobs I would excel at and enjoy. Good Luck!