The Solution Engineer (SE) at Cisco is not just a job, it is a role carrying a high degree of importance in the overall success of our customers. You are your own CTO, the leader of technical engagements and direction of the team covering your agencies.
At the end of the day, your role is to partner with a Sales Account Executive, and together, solve your customers’ most demanding and impactful challenges.
The AE is the CIO and the SE is the CTO. Partnered, you listen and learn, each having a job to do. As the SE, you partner, by helping propose technology solutions to meet customers’ needs and ultimately retiring quota to meet the demands of the business.
How is success measured for the SE? To be honest, there are many aspects and areas of success for an SE. While not a metric, each SE works hard to become a trusted advisor for their customer, to be their POC for all things technical. In this journey, one way of achieving this is by listening and partnering with your customer on their most challenging issues and ensuring what they procure is adopted and performs as expected.
The SE is responsible for keeping their technical skills sharp and if you have a specific love or infinity for a specific technology, by helping others and being a voice within Federal, you can get recognized as a top engineer giving you visibility to executives. Metrics may be customer success, meeting sales goals, and getting CERTs are just a few ways Engineers can be recognized for outstanding work. At the end of the day – Customer Success and Happiness is your North Star.
With any job, there are external demands and internal demands. The SE is expected to have good sound time management skills to address the many and dynamics needs of this position. Technology knowledge growth – if you like to be challenged, cannot think of a better company to test your skills and push you to grow. It is a goal for each SE to be proficient in Routing, Switching, Security, Data Center, and if lucky – collaboration! Quarterly learning, certifications, and plenty of other specialists surrounding you to learn, exchange, and grow together.
Our customers expect us to show up with our best every day. At Cisco, we are living in the AI era. As an employee you will be assigned an AI Agent that you are encouraged to leverage and help you become an even better version of yourself. Allow your agent to do many of the time-consuming tasks that keep you from accomplishing your toughest most critical goals and elevating your North Star which is customer success.