Elasticity in sales causes many to move into the sales department, even if it’s non-sales selling. Businesses these days are more interconnected than ever, with commerce becoming a heavily interdependent field with the advancement of technology, and the ability to reach anyone, anywhere in the world. Companies like Amazon can ship across the world to the far east, manufacturing companies are outsourcing to other countries for cheaper labor and property taxes, and raw materials are becoming more easily accessible in other countries than the U.S. to make things such as the phone you hold in your hand. From personal experience, my father is an electrical engineer by trade, and immediately went to work for a Japanese engineering consulting firm called Fujitsu, where he learned sales much like we are right now. He followed the same elasticity that drives many specialized employees to sales, which is something that could also happen to me as well. I think it’s common for engineers to follow elasticity because it’s easier to learn about the product, and then pick up sales rather than the other way around. I’ll hear him on the phone every now and then talking about 3KVA power (a mechatronics term), and it always reminds me that he is primarily an engineer that moved into sales, where he works now. The same can be said for my capstone project, where we’ve had to do many poster sessions, presentations, and work for capstone class in order to explain our project to someone who maybe has no idea how this stuff works. People are excited to hear about what an incubator can do when it’s wrapped around a microscope, but if I were to tell you that it’s coded in C and uses UART to bring images up, no one’s going to know what that means.
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