SV Academy is the Modern Day Vocational School
By: Vinit Shah
Tags: Startup, Sales, Education, Edtech, Career Change

Headed by founder and CEO Rahim Fazal, SV Academy is revolutionizing what a modern vocational school does.

In my first sales internship at a tech company, I vividly remember a successful colleague of mine describing how college failed to prepare him for his current job as a Senior Account Executive.

“College was pretty pointless for me in getting a job. I don’t remember anything from undergrad other than having to work full-time to pay rent and tuition, while I squeezed in some partying. I didn’t know what sales was until it was the only job I could find. I haven’t looked back since.”

Since 1999, sales occupations in the labor market have grown from 12.9 million to 14.25 million in 2014. That’s nearly 10% of the total employed workforce in the United States. Notable studies have found that 40% of college grads work in a sales role in their first few jobs.

How many of these people would pay for something eight times cheaper than college, directly preparing them for a technology sales career? Or how about those who are unsatisfied with their post bachelor’s degree career but don’t know how to make a drastic change and break into tech?

SV Academy is one of many skill-development, career-transitioning EdTech platforms prioritizing one thing: improving skills and getting hired. Fast. Their mission is to rapidly develop individuals from zero sales knowledge to a practical sales foundation within twelve weeks and guarantee job placement at hot Silicon Valley companies like Vimeo, CloudFlare, and SurveyMonkey among others.

The crazy part: employers who hire SV Academy grads front the $10,000 tuition check to SV Academy.

Trainees pay nothing besides time in 300 hours of intensive training across twelve weeks. Upon job placement, SV Academy grads pay $555 for eighteen months (referred to as an income-sharing agreement or ISA). If your annual income falls below $45,000 or you stop working, payments pause.

Newly minted SV Academy grads have a 100% entry-level sales job placement rate with a median salary of $79,000. Compare that to the $47,000 starting salary figure for college graduates in 2019 (plus student debt) and it becomes apparent why the demand for programs like SV Academy is so high.

Tech companies win by establishing a pipeline of vetted talent and reducing churn in their sales hires.

Talk about a virtuous cycle.

Making the mid-life career switch easier

Take Gloria. She’s currently an eighth-grade teacher making an honest income. She’s a brilliant teacher, has students who love her instruction style, and is doing everything she set out for when she received her education degree at a state school in California.

But there’s something missing.

Three years in and she knows there’s more out there for her. She loves teaching but the pay isn’t great and her student debt isn’t going anywhere. She never really considered working for huge companies, but she’s seen her friends receive great benefits, stable pay increases, PTO, and tuition reimbursement among other attractive perks. Why can’t she be like them?

Everyone’s always complimented her phenomenal communication skills and she’s confident in her ability to learn things fast.

She doesn’t know how or where her skills could be best utilized. Coming from a hometown where most people don’t graduate college, she doesn’t have a network of connections who can provide paths into corporate careers.

After four years of being laser-focused on getting a college degree to become a teacher, she never really considered any other career option. After all, you only study what you’re going to be, right? That’s at least what her high school college advisors ingrained into her mind.

Gloria thinks she could try her hand at marketing or sales. They seem like intriguing paths. But after weeks of late-night Google searches, she still doesn’t know how or where to begin.

I have a LinkedIn profile but who values a teacher’s skillset? What can I do to be hired as soon as the school year ends so I have a stable flow of income to pay off my student loans?

Gloria is an ideal profile candidate who SV Academy looks to help. Driven, skilled, hungry, and just looking to get their foot in the door of the tech industry.

There are hundreds of thousands of people like Gloria across America who need a bridge to take them from one career to the next.

Take someone’s natural talents, change the playing field, and fundamentally alter their life’s trajectory through a single training program or career switch.

SV Academy’s two-sided model allows for businesses to hire trained sales representatives to hit the floor running. Most of the time in entry-level inside sales positions, people are coming in with little to no relevant experience. But by providing cohorts with industry-proven methods and teaching a baseline understanding of technology products, SV Academy has managed to pump out 1,200 sales hires in the past year to San Francisco-based SaaS companies.

Fostering community and providing coaching

The learning curve in sales is steep. As someone who’s seen the differences between skilled salespeople and newer sales reps that get deflated from the constant rejection, lack of instant results, and baked-in uncertainty, I know the importance of surrounding oneself with environments that value coaching and positive reinforcement.

Sales is a lonely endeavor by nature.

Every quarter has a defined target of revenue that needs to be met or exceeded for full compensation. Each individual seller has to hit that number.

But every sales rep is still part of a larger team composed of other sales reps who are also driving numbers for the same region. These reps working alongside you are your teammates and support system.

This makes sales feel exactly like playing singles in tennis at the high school or college level.

Although each tennis player must win individually in a single match, the sum of these wins culminate in a team win.

In both endeavors, you must manage the duality of playing for yourself and having personal pride, while still playing for something bigger — a team win against your opponent.

As a singles player, when the going gets tough and you’re in the heat of the moment with everything on the line, no one can save you but yourself. Similarly, no one can help you but yourself in terms of closing a deal live on the phone. It’s nothing but you, your abilities, and the trust you’ve established with a prospective client over time.

In the team tennis format at the high school and collegiate level, each individual match corresponds to a single point for a team. 21 matches are played in total between the two teams. So if El Paso High is playing Duncanville High, at least 11/21 of the total matches must be won (14 singles matches, 7 doubles matches) to walk away a winner.

While playing singles means being solo on the court during a match, you are still part of something bigger than yourself — the team you represent. Each individual singles win compounds to a team win. Each closed sales deal leads to an attained team quota.

Up until game time, the camaraderie of preparing with your team daily is what got you ready. Every sales training got you ready. All the advice has been shared and wisdom must be internalized; no turning back once the match is started or conversation is flowing.

The team chemistry established from day one with your teammates establishes a sturdy backbone of comfort to fall back upon when the times get tough.

You learn from them, practice with them, and compete against them.

Quality sales teams replicate the same, and SV Academy does that by having a one hundred person cohort filled with diverse people from non-tech backgrounds who are all bound by a common trait of wanting to break into a sales career as prepared as possible.

Community matters. Without a group of seasoned sales reps sharing their wisdom with me at my first sales internship, I would have been easily dissuaded from wanting to continue my journey as a sales professional (cold calling can be ruthlessly soul-crushing).

With an alumni batch of over 1,200 SV Academy grads, new cohort members have a strong community to reach out to and seek advice as obstacles arise in the early parts of their new career jump.

By providing dedicated career coaches for the first year of their sales career, SV Academy hires have a go-to resource for questions about career growth, how to become more marketable to other companies, and tips in asking for raises/promotions.

Again, making the leap from one industry to a completely foreign one can be daunting. Professional norms change, cultures differ, and it can be easy to undervalue personal contributions to companies. Having a trusted advisor can make the pivotal difference that can set you on a path to a more rewarding career.

Paving roads to tech for diverse & underrepresented populations

It’s easy to say for companies that diversity is top of mind or recruiting practices are built for actively seeking talent from underserved communities. We’re all aware of Silicon Valley’s well-documented diversity challenge.

So far, SV Academy is walking the walk by emphasizing recruitment and development of underrepresented demographics: “of the company’s graduates, 60 percent are women, 40 percent are African American or Latino, and 70 percent are first-generation U.S. college graduates.”

CEO Rahim Fazal has lived through what it means to be financially insecure and an outsider to white-collar jobs. He knows this struggle intimately and has baked his values into SV Academy’s mission of simply giving people a shot. As he said,

“all hungry and highly motivated people need is an opportunity to prove themselves.”

People have to get through the door and be immersed in the tech ecosystem before they can leave and create their own company, product, or team.

Having companies like SV Academy actively make efforts to create opportunities for minorities and women will help corporate America slowly transform into a modern and inclusive workforce.

Handing SaaS-Based tech companies handpicked sales talent

Within a decade, the average tenure of a new sales hire has gone from three years to one and a half. This is a costly problem for companies who need at least three months to onramp a new hire and face a turnover rate of 16% on their sales teams. This is for a variety of reasons but the main one is that sales isn’t glamorous or pretty. Constant rejection is hard. Being judged on black and white metrics is difficult. Talking to random people who are disinterested can take a personal toll on self-esteem. Hours can be long and having the pressure of hitting a number at the end of every quarter isn’t for the faint-hearted.

SV Academy combats the challenge of high turnover rate and inexperienced sales hires by attracting and training a vetted group of action-oriented people who are committed to making a career change intentionally.

According to their data, SV Academy’s admission rate is two percent out of 1,000+ applicants.

The quality bar is high so employers are only connected to the cream of the crop.

With over 400 big-name SaaS companies hiring SV Academy grads, mutual trust has been established in the marketplace. Flashy companies like Apple and Salesforce are in line for SV Academy fellows after the first year’s cohort proved their pedigree and results hundreds of times over.

A few of the many popular companies SV Academy fellows have landed at.

70% of new hires have also received promotions in their first year, a promising sign of a quality training process.

Salesforce partnership: a sign of future plans?

I remember seeing SV Academy’s announcement to partner with tech giant Salesforce in creating a certificate track and I jumped out of my chair in awe. This partnership might start the avalanche of companies forming their own specialized education arms and going direct to talent instead of letting universities be the middleman.

Most recruiters in the sales space would emphasize a ‘Salesforce Sales Development Representative’ certificate over a random bachelor’s degree from a middling university. Salesforce sales development representative training screams validation!

This is a win-win for both sides: Salesforce is able to extend its brand and create value by using its reputation to leverage educational materials and partner with a sales training program such as SV Academy.

And what this means is that suddenly, massive tech companies like Salesforce have a hand in the cookie jar of upskilling workers and being a career development platform.

Imagine this once SV Academy or new startups explore different business verticals like finance, marketing, operations?

Shopify has already started its own version of creating direct-to-talent paths with Dev Degree for a computer science accredited degree and work experience at Shopify.

Google recently announced a six month training program targeted at certifying data analytics skills.

Tech companies and new-age training programs like SV Academy are leading the charge in breaking the norms of what it takes to become a technology employee in this new era of work.

Private sector vocational programs might be the solution

I’m increasingly bearish on public sector solutions being executed quickly enough to counteract growing rates of inequality, retraining workers, and promoting job creation in growth sectors like technology.

But I see hope in private sector companies like SV Academy that are community-based platforms whose singular mission is to get people comfortable in transitioning careers and finding skilled work within growing sectors like tech.

Currently, SV Academy’s acceptance rate is low and it has an extremely narrow track of SaaS tech sales, but with time will come more options for folks to go from a tech outsider to a readymade tech employee in three to six months of training.

In America, innovation is largely in the hands of the free market. This long-awaited disruption is finally happening in education and upskilling.

SV Academy is one of many vehicles of change in EdTech drastically transforming how purposeful and seamless education can be in the 2020s.