Earlywork’s three-week course lands graduates $100,000 salaries, flights for tech sales juniors

A new part-time tech sales bootcamp is delivering its graduates healthy salaries and global perks within weeks of completion.

Junior saleswoman Alishia Lambropoulos at the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.

Sales has become the second hottest role in tech with a shortage of talent now seeing graduates of part-time bootcamps landing $100,000 salaries within weeks of completion.

Some graduates who have transitioned to tech sales from other sectors such as healthcare are being flown across the world to attend onboarding and training processes in the US.

After software engineers, sales roles have become some of the most in-demand and hardest to fill at a junior level, according to tech careers community Earlywork and Blackbird VC’s jobs platform Lilypad.

Alishia Lambropoulos is one such sales transplant, arriving in the tech sector after having spent five years as an exercise physiologist.

Ms Lambropoulos, who completed Earlywork’s new three-week sales bootcamp in February this year, landed a role with US-based Datadog at the company’s Sydney office.

Almost all of the first cohort of Earlywork tech sales graduates have found roles, according to co-founder Dan Brockwell, who said the average package of those who found work was $101,375, not including super.

Ms Lambropoulos at Datadog's headquarters in New York.

Graduates, who only pay for the course if they find a role within six months of completion, have landed jobs with SafetyCulture, Datadog, Ansarada, Databricks, Verkada, Ofload, Shippit and Yotpo.

Part of Ms Lambropoulos’s onboarding at Datadog included being flown to New York to attend training at the company’s US headquarters. It gave her time for some travel, including a trip to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Her transition to tech began last year when she attended a women in tech event held by Finder, where her partner worked.

“The women who were part of that conference were super motivating so after that I began to learn how to code and thought I might be able to become a software developer,” she said.

“But then I kind of got stuck because coding isn’t exactly people-facing and I love working with others. That’s when I came across the sales bootcamp.”

Coding courses were often in the range of $20,000 to $30,000 and although many offered payment plans, it was a confronting amount, Ms Lambropoulos said.

The sales bootcamp, which has a $495 deposit upfront and only required students to pay the remaining $4000 if they found a role within six months, was more comforting, she said.

Earlywork co-founders Jono Herman, Dan Brockwell and Marina Wu.

Earlywork’s sales bootcamp is part of a broader shift toward micro-courses in the technology sector, where employers have been vocal about the fact that some roles don’t require university degrees and that tailored courses were often more beneficial.

Mr Brockwell said it was often difficult to know whether junior talent were open to sales roles, and Earlywork’s surveys of about 200 companies had shown junior sales positions were some of the most in demand.

“The tricky thing is that you can’t really look at someone’s LinkedIn profile and know this person is trying to break into sales,” he said.

“Even if you look at industry reports by the Tech Council of Australia, you don’t necessarily see tech sales mentioned as a specific discipline and you don’t actually see that talent gap called out.”

Earlywork had finished three tech sales bootcamps this year, with about sixty people having now completed the three-week, part-time course.

Mr Brockwell said: “At the end of a day, a tech company needs to build a product and sell that product. We see so much education and bootcamps for engineers but very little on the sales side.”

For Ms Lambropoulos, the transition had been a little nerve wracking in the current economic climate but ultimately very fulfilling.

“After I completed the course and I was applying for sales jobs, there were all these tech lay-offs happening not just in Australia but across the world so that was a little bit scary,” she said.

“Telling people I was joining tech while hearing on the news that every tech company was laying off staff was a bit crazy.

“But it was also pretty exciting to get to learn in a different part of the world and I now have a job that offers career progression.”