For 2015 marketing graduate Tyler Kluempke, when Oregon State’s football season started without him in Corvallis to cheer for the Beavers in person, that’s when it hit him that he’s part of the real world now.
The good news for the former Marketing Club president is that his first stop after the College of Business is “exactly what I wanted to get into.”
Kluempke is a sales and business development representative with Oracle, and as the school year approached in Corvallis, he was wrapping up five weeks of training – the final three at corporate headquarters in San Francisco, the first two in Boston, where Kluempke will be based.
“It’s been a crazy couple weeks to say the least,” Kluempke said Sept. 14.
In his role with Oracle, he will serve as an account manager with current cloud ERP systems clients and also try to grow revenue streams. ERP stands for enterprise resource planning, and Kluempke describes the systems as “software packages that are the essential backbone of all businesses across all industries.”
“Financial reporting, procurement, project management, everything a C-level employee needs to run a business,” he said. “My territory is the Pacific Northwest and all of western Canada, mid- to small-size businesses up to $500 million in revenue. I’ll try to generate new business, warm calling, cold calling. It’s a sales role, a killer job, exactly what I wanted to get into. I always wanted to be in the tech world.”
Kluempke said the Career Success Center in particular and the College of Business in general “really put the opportunities in place for me to learn a lot of essential material, to really excel.”
“You hear a lot of material, it’s like drinking out of a firehose, and things kind of piece together once you’re out of the school zone and in the workforce,” he said. “I went to a lot of guest speaker events and talked to executives. There were a lot of similarities in the answers when it came to people successful enough to reach upper-level management or the executive level, and it usually came down to putting your head down and just working, just doing your job. Those are simple concepts that kind of get masked in the tech world, where everyone thinks they’re going to have the next Facebook or Snapchat and it’s going to go boom overnight. They’re not paying attention to those long hours, going to the events they need to go to, going to a networking event.”
