Are you thinking about changing your career? Maybe you’re coming back to the workforce after being a caregiver, or perhaps you are looking for a new challenge, one with a better salary and benefits. Palette Skills tells you what you need to know for a successful career transition.
If you live in the prairie provinces, there’s never been a better time to get started with a career transition to B2B (business-to-business) tech sales. That’s because tech is changing everything on the Canadian prairie. From sophisticated digital and precision applications in the world of agriculture, to innovative start-ups in cities like Lethbridge, Saskatoon and elsewhere, technology is changing lives and creating opportunities.
Martha—that’s how she’d like to be known—is the first person to be hired by one of our employer partners through Upskill Canada, just three months after the launch of the national talent platform. There is nothing quite as gratifying as celebrating the successful career transition of one of our program participants
Palette Skills decided to catch up with employer partner Damon Johnson, director of strategic projects at Global Ag Risk Solutions, to find out more about his experience with the Automation and Digital Agriculture Specialist program.
It’s easy to take the skills required to be a great business development representative (BDR) for granted, but in today’s competitive and online business world, it’s worth taking a look at some critical marketing skills that will set you apart as a sales professional.
As a tech entrepreneur and manager, it’s in your interest to make sure you and your workforce are surrounded by, and are contributing to, a great learning culture. Palette Skills looks at why and tells you how!
Get ready for a chance to meet great new talent in the world of precision agriculture!
Have a job interview coming up? Then you’ll need to learn about what are called behavioural interview questions. They can be intimidating, but we’ve got a guide for giving great answers!
We get so focused on doing one thing that it’s difficult to see the wider impact of what we do. Our programs build technical skills, and skills that help participants change their lives, and find personal success.
Tech sales means any sales role that involves selling new technology. It can include selling new processes or new ways of doing things. But don’t think that it’s the same thing as working in a retail sales job, where you are selling to consumers. Tech sales representatives usually work for what are called B2B (business-to-business) companies.
Startups thrive when they can build a great shared culture of values and aspiration. When it comes to a new business development representative for your innovative business, look for someone who shares your vision, and who has the talent to help build it out.
Canada has much of the infrastructure in place in order to grow its innovation economy. The country is home to a number of globally-ranked universities, and cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are hubs for globally successful start-ups. It’s the beginning of a great ecosystem, but it needs more.
Business landscapes are changing, meaning businesses and workers must now look to workforce development to thrive. Upskilling is the key! Like many countries, Canada is
The tech sector continues to drive pandemic recovery in Canada, which means that B2B tech sales is a great choice if you’re looking for a career change. So what about making a good living, and moving up the ladder in a new B2B career?
Tech companies and other highly-skilled industries in Canada continue to experience workforce shortages. So why can’t we simply recruit the workers we need? While hiring seems like a straightforward process, the reality is that it isn’t an easy task in the current climate. Hiring new staff can be a long and expensive undertaking, so we’ll highlight some challenges many recruiters face, and look at how to deal with them.
Inherently complex and technical products need simple explanations that are seamlessly aligned to the needs of potential customers. It’s just one example of a critical skill set for tech salespeople. So now that you’re here, let’s take a look five of the most important skills and attributes that are especially vital for tech sales people.
We now have a model of upskilling through Palette Skills that demonstrates not only how upskilling can be done, but that it can be done in a wildly successful way for both workers and employers. By scaling what works and building an ecosystem of upskilling across Canada, we will not only help secure our role as an innovative and globally competitive country, we will create a path to building an inclusive knowledge economy that creates access and opportunities for all workers to participate.
Business development representatives stand at the forefront of the B2B sales process. Their main purpose is to generate qualified leads. They then pass these leads onto their sales teams.
BDRs are in high demand, especially in Canada’s fast-growing B2B tech sector, where companies constantly require people to seek out and qualify new leads. Learn more about why this might be a great career for you in the following article.
Prior to designing our upskilling programs, we needed to know what skills employers look for, and how they evaluate whether a candidate has those skills. This information would also tell us what skills are in demand, and give us data to see if the labour pool does in fact lack these skills. From there, we set out to start to build a program around improving these skills.
Being an adult learner can be challenging. No matter whether you’re trying to change industries, or catch up with the modern world, the learning process can make you feel like a fish out of water. But there are advantages to being an adult learner, and one of the most important ones is that you want to learn, and you have a goal that drives you.
Two plus years into the global pandemic, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that as far as employment and careers are concerned, it’s all bad news. But the fact is that Canada’s job numbers have surged ahead, and despite the threat of disruption posed by Omicron, it’s clear that Canadian workers are engaged in the job market like never before, and searching for new opportunities. The question is—how do Canadian workers build the right skills for these new opportunities, so they can quickly find the path to a career?
At Palette Skills, we are focused on helping innovative companies find the talent they need by identifying untapped talent pools and upskilling workers into new, high demand jobs across different sectors. We are often asked about our approach to solving this challenge and the program model we engage to develop solutions. The lessons below illustrate some of the insights we’ve gained over the years as we’ve tested and expanded on our work.
The most important takeaway from last year is that we are a resilient species. For all the job loss, business closures, loneliness and heartbreak, we also learned that people can do incredible things if they are committed and given the chance. This should be our mantra for 2021 – it is our path to recovery. Canada can recover from the pandemic only when more Canadians can participate in economic expansion. We have the talent, but organizations need to work together to ensure that people have the foundation and skills to succeed in building the economy.
Should we prioritize getting people back into their old jobs — jobs whose very existence is increasingly threatened? How do we balance the talent needs in traditional sectors with the growing skills gaps in fast-growing, knowledge-based firms? Canada needs a national approach to upskilling that focuses on technical skills, soft skills and resilience.
As Canada works to recover from the economic impact of COVID-19, Palette Skills has built a consortium of partners that will collaboratively identify talent gaps as they emerge and develop strategies for bridging Canadians who are best positioned to fill these roles. Palette Skills and its partners will develop demand-driven, industry-led, accelerated training programs that will offer effective skilling that quickly transitions more Canadians into high-demand roles in growing industries.
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