 In this video I'm going to be interviewing Josh, who was an engineering student who was taking 19 credits and also working 40 hours a week and decided it just wasn't for him. So he started looking into alternative options other than college of getting into a career that would have a much better return on his investment. So Josh decided to switch careers and within a few months he was in a brand new job with a great salary and this is going to be his story. So I think this is going to be especially useful for people who are in college right now and they're having a lot of doubts about the degree that they're going for and they don't see a different degree that's going to be a better alternative for them. And we also get a little bit into the topic of strategically planning your career. So definitely watch this one till the end because there's going to be a lot of value in this interview and Josh's story is really awesome. What's happening guys? Welcome back to the channel. Today I have a very special guest. Josh is coming on the channel and he just got a job offer a few days ago as a sales development representative. So I thought I'd bring him on the channel talk about his journey of getting into sales development representative and his overall journey in general because he comes from an engineering background. I know a lot of engineers watch my channel. So thank you so much for coming on the channel. Josh, I appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me then. Awesome. So let's go ahead and start kind of at the beginning. So, you know, you're you're in engineering school. You're you're going for an engineering degree, which is just brutal, right? Everybody knows I talk about it on my channel. Absolutely brutal. If you try to do engineering, it's going to keep you super busy. You're also working like a full time job, I believe, and I don't want to tell the story. So just kind of go into what your background is a little bit and what you were doing at the time when you discovered tech sales. Yeah, for sure. I graduated high school in 2020. So when I found course careers, I was about three semesters give or take into college. I was working pretty close to full time at Target. And I was going to Youngstown State University for industrial engineering. Like that's insane that you were able to do that, by the way. Yeah, it was a lot working close to full time and keeping up with an engineering major wasn't easy. Yeah. How many credits were you taking in industrial? If you don't mind me asking. Well, because I ended up kind of switching schools around like first semester freshman year. I lost some credit hours. So I was trying to make up. I was I think around 18 or 19 credit hours. Yeah, you were taking 18, 19 credit hours and working 40 hours a week. Yeah, it was it was rough. Well, you have to make it to me somehow. But life is probably going to get easier from here on out for sure. Definitely. That is insane. And engineering classes are not easy either. No, not at all. They definitely push you there rightfully. So it's not easy being an engineer and it's a job the world needs. But yeah, all right. So so you were doing engineering and, you know, you were looking at kind of like your return on investment. You were telling me you were looking at kind of like what you would expect to make after you got through an engineering degree, which typically takes people five years or more, by the way, like a lot of people think you graduate in engineering degrees in four years. And yeah, you know, if you if that's all you do and you're a genius, then sure, yeah, four years, sure. But a lot of people, it takes five years, even six years in some cases to get your engineering degree. So you were looking at the return on investment and can you kind of talk about that and why you decided to not do engineering? Definitely. When I first graduated high school, I was really aware of college debt and how expensive it was. I was first going to a branch of Penn State for engineering. And I quickly realized that by the end of it, I would be at least a hundred thousand dollars in debt, even after the federal loans and the scholarships I had. So that's when I found a local college that was cheaper. I went to Youngstown State. They were a little cheaper close to ten grand a year. But even then at forty grand at minimum after four years, probably realistic fifty fifty five after five. I mean, most engineers only make around sixty five K starting out. So the return on investment there isn't that great. Yeah. And engineering is actually one of the better degrees, right? So I mean, there's many degrees out there where you start off that way less than that. And in some cases, you start off with being underemployed or underemployed for a very long period of time. Unfortunately, with a lot of the degrees, I would say overall in the long run engineering degrees do pay off. They are a good return on investment overall. But for sure. You were looking kind of for something quicker, right? You were looking for a better option. And then you told me you were searching on indeed.com, I believe. And that's when you discovered sales development or tech sales. And can you kind of talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I was really trying to decide what was right for me college wise. I just didn't think I could make it working all this time and going to school in four to five years of engineering. So I was looking at some other options out there scouring through indeed. And I came across an ad for the course careers sales development course. And the more I looked into it, the more that I found that I was already kind of acquiring some interest in business and things like that. How useful the skills and sales is regardless of the position itself. And I saw this as an opportunity for me to fast track myself to a career that is going to have a great payoff and allow me to kind of build on some great skills to pursue some personal growth down the line. Yeah. One thing I like to recommend on my channel and I got this from Tim Ferris actually, he's the one who originally said this is I like to recommend skills where you win even if you lose, right? So these are the types of skills where even if it doesn't work out for you in the long run, like, let's say, you know, you do tech sales for a few years and you end up not working in sales. The skills that you learn from tech sales are going to help you for the rest of your life in so many different ways, whether you start your own business or whether you go into management or, you know, just about any direction you go, the skills that you learn doing tech sales are going to help you tremendously. So it's a skill where you win even if you lose. And those are the types of skills that I really like to highly recommend on this channel because they're going to help you no matter what. So you were looking into tech sales and an ad for course careers popped up, right? So course careers is owned by a good friend of mine, Troy. He basically created this awesome program where not only does he train you in tech sales, but he also gets you interviews for entry level jobs as well. So he actually partners with companies and gets you free interviews. You don't even have to go through the normal, you know, searching and interview process that you would normally have to go to where you apply to like a hundred or 200 different places. He just gets you a bunch of interviews right after you finish the program. By the way, I want to mention really quick guys, Troy does have a free training. You can check it out. I'll put it down in the link as well as the pen comment below. Basically, he's going to go over what tech sales is, what the different roles are, what the other roles you can expect to move into are and just a high level overview of tech sales to see if it's a good fit for your personality. So definitely check that out down below. I went through it. It was very helpful. And so you basically discovered course careers. Can you kind of talk about that and how course careers was? It was phenomenal course. Troy does a great job working with everybody individually in the program and it's only going to continue growing. There's a lot of great information. The course itself kind of starts out with three really foundational books that especially the first one I would recommend anybody read how to win friends and influence people and he followed that up with fanatical prospecting and spin selling and those three books just kind of give you a great intro and understanding of sales tech wise to and then you just kind of delve into the more specifics throughout the program and it's all at your own pace. So I was still working a full-time job. I dropped out of college at this point and I was just kind of able to go through it as convenient for me. I was no longer planning my day around my college schedule. It was really at my own disposal, which was great. Got it. So you kind of started going through the course while you were still working full-time and so you were basically just going through it part-time just maybe like 10-15 hours a week, something like that. How long did it take you to get through the course? I started the end of January and finished the middle of May. So about four and a half fish months. It just isn't bad at all. Yeah, definitely not bad. So after you got through the course, how long did it take you to land your first job offer? By the time I got finished up and approved through the course and officially got my offer from my company, it was about a month. Wow. Okay. So basically from the time you started the course to the time you got your first job offer, even though you went through it kind of part-time, was about five and a half months or so approximately overall. Yeah, give or take. Yep. Awesome. And how much was that first job offer, if you don't mind me asking in terms of salary or on-target earnings? No, I don't mind sharing it all. My salary is 52,000 plus the on-target commission is 18. So they call it 70,000 OT on-target earnings. That is pretty amazing for something that doesn't require a college degree or any experience and you can get into in a few months. That's not bad. That's awesome. Yeah, it's crazy. The ROI is huge. Yeah, it's just a lot of people, like when I first started talking about this, a lot of people just didn't believe it at all. And people on my channel are slowly starting to realize like, wow, you can actually do this. Like you can actually get a job that has that insane ROI and you don't need experience or a college degree to do it. Like, how is this possible? And then I'm starting to interview people who are like two years in, three years in, four years in, five years in, you know, I just interviewed a couple of people. One of them was four years in. He's making like 220,000. Another one's five years in, but he also has a background in tech because he worked in like other parts of tech and he's probably going to hit 600K. That's crazy. Yeah. So it's one of those jobs. I mean, even as an engineer, if you did a phenomenal job and you were like an engineering manager, maybe you could hit 200, maybe, maybe 250 if you were in like a really elite role. Yeah. You know, maybe as a software engineer, you could do more as a software engineer there, you could do a little different industrial engineering, maybe in an like an elite role. If you were a manager or something 200, 250, but for software sales, the sky's the limit. There's, there's pretty much no cap. You can literally make millions of dollars a year. If you're bringing in millions of dollars of value to the company, you're probably going to be making millions of dollars a year in software sales because it's, it's, it's a meritocracy. Basically, it's directly correlated with how much value you bring into the company. And you know, you have a very bright future ahead of you and tech sales. There's a ton of opportunity ahead of you. So I wanted to also talk a little bit about which role exactly did you go into? Was it like, what's the technical term for the role? It's a SDR sales development representative. Okay. It has a couple other different names. Some companies call it business development representative. Other of them are even account develop representative. It's, it's all kind of the same position. So you were actually very selective about which company you wanted and you've got the number one company you wanted. So congrats on that. So do you kind of have like a kind of a career plan or something like that mapped out in your head of what you're trying to go for in the next few years? Yeah, I kind of touched on earlier how I sales is such a valuable skill. And as an SDR, you kind of cover the first half of the sales process of prospecting and qualifying and research. So a lot of SDR is transferred into the account executive role after a year, year and a half, which is closing the deals and finishing the sales process. That's definitely where I want to start. So I can kind of have my whole sales process figured out and so I can kind of take that with me through my career. And from there, I really think the sky is the limit. There is so much growth from an SDR position. I mean, there's so many entrepreneurs and CEOs of companies who've started in an SDR role. There's really so much room for growth. The sky really is the limit. Absolutely. And that's another thing I kind of wanted to mention is the skills that you learn. They're also very flexible on top of being incredibly valuable. So there's certain skills that are very valuable on the market, but they're not very flexible. So an example of that would be medical. You know, I came from a medical background and the skills that I learned, you know, getting my medical degree, they're very valuable and I was, you know, compensated quite a bit for it, but they were not very flexible. You know, it's kind of hard for me to use those skills in medical and like go into a different industry, for instance, whereas tech sales extremely flexible. I mean, you can, if you want to, you can rise up vertically. There's so much opportunity. Like I said before, there's, you know, people I'm bringing on the channel probably going to hit 600K this year. There's other people that I'm thinking about bringing on the channel that might hit over a million this year. Chances are I'll probably bring somebody out on at some point who does over a million dollars a year and tech sales. So there's a ton of vertical opportunity. There's also horizontal opportunity as well. You can move into executive roles because nobody understands a company's customers better than the people who talk to the customers on a day-to-day basis, which is the sales team, right? The tech, the tech sales, right? So it really makes a lot of sense for you to move into kind of like an executive role or a management role or in some cases even a, you know, CEO role and then down the line as well. There's a lot of opportunity for starting your own business because when you're talking to customers every single day, you're understanding what their needs are. You're understanding like, you know, openings in the market and that's what business is really all about is just problem solving like practical problem solving. There's a bunch of people who have a problem in a particular market. The problem is not being addressed. You create a service or a product that addresses that problem. That's business. Basically, so yeah, so there's just a ton of opportunity for people who go into tech sales. And then another really good thing about tech sales is let's just say for whatever reason, you don't like it, right? You're three months in, you don't like it. You didn't have to waste a hundred thousand dollars and five years of your life to figure that out. You wasted a few hundred dollars for, you know, a service or a course and like a few months of your life to figure that out. So it's not really the same risk. When you look at it from like a risk reward perspective, it's just not even on the same spectrum as something like college. And Josh, what did you think of the intro course? I'm just curious. I think it kind of, I had a lot of questions when I first looked on the website and the intro course does a good job of showing you what you're getting into and answering pretty much all of the questions that I had at least. So it gives you a really good idea what you're going into and if you think the course is going to be for you before you even make the investment. So Josh, what would you say to somebody who's kind of on the fence and they're thinking about doing tech sales, but they're not a hundred percent sure whether they want to jump into it or use course careers? What would you say to that person? I would say why not? If you have some good people skills, some good communication skills, that's really all you need to get started. I mean, I had very minimal, definitely not any professional sales. I had some retail sales experience. That was it. I know people who are bartenders or construction workers who took this course and had no issue getting a job that they're in great roles. So if it's something that you have any interest in, do it. You can't get much higher of an ROI than you can on this course. I literally made my money back for this course in three days of my new job. So if you have the interest, do it. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the channel and sharing your story and maybe we'll have you back in a year or two to get an update. Yeah, give me a follow up.