Hi /r/PF,
I have been working for my present employer for a little over a year. We are a b2b sales/consulting company, and I have had modest success over the past 12 months in the sales/consulting role. We have about ~25 sales consultants on our staff.
My company is growing, and our CEO has a vision to grow the company from about ~25 to about ~30-35 salespeople or even more over the next few years. I am happy to continue in my current role as my salary is comfortable and the lifestyle is acceptable (early afternoons off on Friday, pretty much unlimited vacation time once quota is met, etc.), but this really isn't what I'm interested in doing with my life long-term. I am a young person, mid/late 20's, and really beginning to think about my future in chunks of 1-5 years (thanks PF, I have budgets and goals and a plan now :) )
I have about 3 years complete on my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and almost completed my concurrent associate's in database management. Our IT person who has sort of guided my company through the internet age has recently (first wk of Jan) stepped away and left a void in the IT/computer help/PHP/SQL programming needs for our company. In fact as a sales guy I'm having to submit an increasing number of help tickets and the times are getting longer and longer for resolution. He stepped away in January, and nobody has been hired, or even to my knowledge interviewed for the open IT position.
My company in our line of work really needs an IT guy, and also a PHP programmer. We run our own custom software on our own independent database; we also host our own website our clients interact with. I wrote my first computer programs when i was 12; for my 18th birthday I started a computer repair/consulting company and started with fixing granny's computer and over the course of 5 years turned it into managing the web design and IT needs of over a dozen small companies in the city I used to live in. I believe that my work experience combined with my (not-yet-complete) education uniquely qualifies me for the IT vacancy my company has. With my CEO's vision for company growth, I honestly feel that I can make a bigger contribution to the growth and the bottom line by servicing our technology infrastructure and teaching our new employees how to both work the computer system and teach them what I've learned in the past year of the sales job I've been working.
This brings me to my point: How do I approach my CEO and make the suggestion to change roles? Our company culture is rather informal, "work hard play hard", and I have every reason to believe my CEO would honestly consider me if I had a good reason for him to. He's a sales guy who started with the company 20 years ago and watched it grow/ grew it himself in leadership roles. I believe my potential value to the company can be an order of magnitude higher handling all of our IT needs than being an average, modestly successful salesperson. I have already volunteered several times to be on marketing dept. projects involving our newsletter and website, submitted code to our former IT guy for tweaks to our internal system, and even volunteered to troubleshoot bugs and take some help tickets from the stack we've got now. This is what I'm passionate about - I'd do it for free on my own time if they'd let me.
Oh, and I live in a university town. I intend to complete both of my degrees concurrently to working as an IT person. Sales is currently about 55 hours a week and is exhausting on my brain; I believe i can support the workload of the 40 hour a week IT gig with some night classes/online classes to finish the degree. I know that that will be important for consideration for this, and other future IT positions. I don't have any plan on how that factors into the discussion, but it is a personal goal of mine too.
Submitted March 08, 2017 at 08:46AM by dispose_whenfinished http://ift.tt/2m26uhz