19 Jun The Academia Sales Academy – Training the stars of the future.
As part of our continuing development and understanding of the need to support University and Further Education leavers, Academia recently hosted our now annual Sales Academy, where brave candidates showcased their sales and business developments skills in order to win a working contract with one of the UK’s biggest IT Solutions Company.
After the success of our first Sales Academy (December 2015) it was a unanimous Board decision to run the recruitment project again. Ably lead by our Sales Manager Julian Furne, the Sales Academy is driven by the passion for developing future talent within the Academia family. For this year’s intake, we partnered with graduate recruitment specialists, Venatrix, to find this talent – and they did not disappoint.
After an intense day of role plays, assessments and interviews, we were delighted to offer a position to not one but four fantastic candidates. They accepted on the spot and will join the team at the end of May 2017. This will be just the start of their journey with us though, as once joined they will enter a thorough training process – both internally and externally through industry leaders as well as vendor specific training. No stone is left unturned as Julian and the team guide and shape these rough diamonds into the next generation of top salespeople.
Given what we saw on the day of the assessments, we’re sure that they are well up for the challenge, promoting some healthy competition at the same time! By providing structured training as well as on-the-job learning, the Sales Academy provides everything these graduates need to set them up for future success.
Why do we run the Academy? Simply because we believe in development, both of raw talent as well as the team who are already growing their careers with us. For this reason, our Sales Team Leaders play an active part in both the selection of the candidates as well as their training once they’re part of the team. Several of our TLs are graduates of our own internal Leadership Academy and as such are encouraged to mentor the new Junior Account Managers. This close relationship with our internal leaders (not to mention highly successful salespeople) acts as another incredible opportunity for the new recruits to learn from the best.
Sales in itself is a challenging but highly rewarding career and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome these four future superstars to the fold. Needless to say, we’re already planning – and looking forward to – the graduation celebration of our Sales Academy 2017
To learn more about the Academy and Academia, please contact our marketing and PR team on marketing@oldsite.academia.co.uk
