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Summary: Colleges and universities guide their students toward non-sales careers in big corporations. They frequently don’t position sales careers as alternatives to a standard career path out of college.

About six people will raise their hands if you ask a group of 500 sales professionals if they have a business degree with a sales emphasis. I am surprised that there are so few formal sales degree programs at our colleges and universities. I suppose one of the reasons for this is the prehistoric belief that success in a sales career is primarily a result of a great personality. This belief is even more ridiculous when you consider the current hi-tech tools used in sales and the increasingly more complex products and services that sales professionals are responsible for selling.

What do America’s colleges and universities teach young minds about sales careers? For that matter, what do they teach students in general about their careers? Sadly I have to report that for the most part they teach the same non-sales-career-friendly three things today as they did 100 years ago.

Your goal is to find a job working for someone. A sales career is about as close as you can come to working for yourself while being employed. Comb through any college business textbook and you will find little to nothing about self employment as a career possibility. Entrepreneurialism is not given a lot of textbook or professor focus in college. Why? Most college professors are the antithesis of entrepreneurialism; as a result they aren’t normally going to be big proponents of sales careers.

Not only do you want to go to work for someone, but you want to work for a very large corporation. The holy grail of employment, according to your college instructors, is to go to work for the very largest corporation that will have you. They seem to set their students up for failure since the vast majority of workers work in small to medium companies in the U.S. I’m not too sure that large companies are always the best learning ground either. In a large corporation the new hire is just another salesperson in a sea of salespeople; they frequently do not receive a lot of individual attention or mentoring.

You want to negotiate the best salary and benefits you can. While you probably don’t have any argument with wanting the best compensation you can get, please note that they are not including “at risk” income in commissioned sales positions. The concept of commission to the staff at a college or university is about as well understood as animal husbandry is to Paris Hilton.

I’m a big believer in getting a college education if that’s a possibility for you. However, please don’t rely on your college professors for career guidance. They see an extremely small slice of the business world and as a result can’t see a sales career in context. Remember, self employment, working for small scrappy companies and sales careers in general have launched a multitude of stellar careers in the U.S.

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Tags: universities

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