Speaker
Description
What happens when a language teacher is dropped into the deep end of the telecom industry, with zero background in fiber, DWDM, or why “it depends” is the only honest answer to anything? This talk is a personal journey of switching careers from academia and language teaching into the world of tech sales in a fast-moving, acronym-rich, and precision-driven industry.
The presentation will explore the early days of trying to sell services she barely understood, the awkward moments of miscommunication with engineers, and the hard-earned lessons of navigating between customer expectations and technical reality. It will touch on the cultural gap between sales and tech: how each side uses language differently, and how learning to "speak engineer" was just as hard as learning a foreign language.
From amusing misunderstandings to practical strategies that helped bridge the gap, this talk is for anyone who's ever had to translate between departments, roles, or mindsets.
Key Points / Takeaways:
* Switching from humanities to telecom: a career change story
* First encounters with technical product language (and confusion)
* What “cannot be done” really means (and what it doesn’t)
* Why sales and tech often miscommunicate, and how to fix it
* Lessons in building trust with engineers
* Learning to translate between customer needs and engineering limitations
* Humility, curiosity, and the importance of asking “dumb” questions
* How being a language teacher actually helps in tech, unexpectedly
