Receptionist to Solution Engineer

Mine is a story of hunger, curiosity and blind luck.

In 2011, I took a leap of faith to move to Australia. Scraping together my savings of $5k after a year in the crashing American economy and six jobs…. all at once. My American dream of ‘making it’ would somehow come true on the opposite side of the Pacific and all because a company called Salesforce had democratised software, and in turn, opened the gates for non-developers to have a career in technology.

Salesforce had democratised software, and in turn, opened the gates for non-developers to have a career in technology

When I landed in Australia, I applied for any and all jobs as well as registered with every recruitment agency. I remember so distinctly the pure excitement I had when the temp agency asked if I could fill in for a receptionist at a software company for a day. My boyfriend ironed my shirt as I rushed through a shower and arrived to be one of four receptionists. I was there to help support the front desk while they took turns going in for Google Apps training.

Being chatty, I started talking with the consultants who were hired to deploy Google Apps at this technology company. I found out that my previous year as the go-for grad in the local newspaper back in California had prepared me for this coincidental moment – I had volunteered for any task and the IT guy asked me to train the newspaper in Google Apps.

Bingo! After a day at reception, I was the Google Apps Change Manager for a Technology company.

I found out months later that one of the consultants, Andrew Price, at Cloud Sherpas had told the IT Manager to save money on training and just hire the new girl at reception for six months as Change Manager. There started my career in technology.

After my six month gig as a change manager, I got an email from an ‘Innovation Manager’, at a small company asking for a Business Analyst. I quickly looked up what a BA was and said I’d be thrilled! I met the Innovation Manager, Scott Gassmann, the next day as he asked me if I was interested in going through intensive training in Sydney to learn a cloud app called Salesforce. I signed the contract on the spot and flew to Sydney two days later for the ADM201 Course.

I had no idea what Salesforce was, much less a CRM. The concepts of record types, page layouts, and dependent picklists were a foreign language to me, but by the end of the training, I felt ready to take on the world. I could build something without learning any code, almost felt like I had cheated my way past the typical developer career, unlocking this secret world of possibility. I spent Christmas break building this org with Scott in two weeks (yeah – a whole org!). It was the most thrilling thing I had done to date and I was utterly addicted, hook, line and sinker.

I felt I had cheated my way past the typical developer career

From System Admin to Innovation Team Lead, I had a team offshore in India. We built a learning portal, integrated it to Salesforce, installed apps from the Appexchange, I wrote automation (workflow and formula fields were all we had then) and the world was my oyster. Then I went to Dreamforce.

I paid my own way to Dreamforce, sleeping on my friend's apartment floor.

I wanted to know what else was out there in this world where non-developer geeks could change the world, one workflow rule at a time. I paid for my flight, slept on the floor of my friend’s apartment and went to as many sessions as I could, being the only one from my company in San Francisco. I saw twitter-famous MVPs like SteveMo, The Formula King. I picked up all the swag, all the books, went to all the booths, met random devs at the Red Hot Chilli Peppers concert and felt like I was part of something bigger than me, my company, or Australia. This was electrifying and the kool-aid tasted oh so sweet.

I returned with tons of ideas and projects. After I had mastered one org, I wanted to get my hands on more. I went into consulting with the leading consultancy at the time, Cloud Sherpas, with curiosity pushing the limits of my skills, learning more every day.

I learned from the master Ed Backhouse, the first Scrum Master I ever met

I learned how to do proper BA work, lead projects, became a scrum master, project manager and put my hand up for any project involving new things. I got to lead projects in Hong Kong, New York and Australia. Salesforce came out with hundreds of new features and toys three times a year and the most fun way to learn was to build it. I remember when Visual Workflow came out, allowing us to extend automation into the apex trigger world without writing a line of code. I revelled in the feeling I got when I told a developer “but we could do that with flow.”

I personified the ‘clicks not code’ mantra that Salesforce puts on repeat – but I’ve lived it. I’m part of a community of people who are excited, curious learners who figure things out by clicking.

I was so honoured a couple months ago to get a text from that consultant I had met at reception just over five years before asking, “Do you want a job at Salesforce?” I never thought it possible that someone like me had enough technical experience to talk to the executives in Australia.

Do you want a job at Salesforce?

Me. The woman who has never written code, but is a pure figure-outer. Someone who has failed a visual workflow 155 times, but the 156th version had gone live.

Me. The woman who triggered headless flows, process builders, built Vlocity scripts and configured countless consoles, custom fields, page layouts, record types, apps, mapped API fields for middleware to talk to printers.

Me. The woman who has had to open the dev console to read JSON debugging code and me, who now has five Salesforce certifications and has now been honoured to join the Solution Engineering team at Salesforce for Service Cloud.

In six years, I have moved from a receptionist to being a Solution Engineer at Salesforce. I get to work for the #1 company to work for in Australia. Because Salesforce is a cloud app accessible by business users as well as developers, I have seen my life expand into understanding businesses and building for their needs.

I came out of the GFC in America hungry for a career. My curiosity opened doors I never knew existed, quenching my thirst for knowledge. And I was in the right place at the right time, at a receptionist desk in June 2011. My story is not unique and with technology like Salesforce, can my career become the status quo.

Salesforce brings technology into the lives of business users seamlessly and empowers good ideas to come from anyone at any level within a company.