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2020-09-29

MCiT Careers: Alberto Ballan talks about his successful career path at Cisco

Management, Communication and IT Master’s Alumni Alberto Ballan has been working at Cisco for five years. In our interview, he talks about his success story and gives exciting insights into his professional life. — LTR: Lecturer Reinhard Bernsteiner, Head of Studies Peter Mirski, MCiT Master's Alumni Alberto Ballan, Lecturer Dietmar Kilian. Foto Credit: MCI

Management, Communication and IT Master’s Alumni Alberto Ballan has been working at Cisco for five years. During his study trip to Silicon Valley, Alberto had the opportunity to visit Cisco headquarters in San Jose. This put Cisco on his radar as a top employer and eventually he landed his first job there. Recently Alberto was promoted to Service Sales Business Development Manager - Strategy and Operations. In our interview, he talks about his success story and gives exciting insights into his professional life.

What does a day as a Team Leader at Cisco look like?

As a Team Lead of presales professionals, my core job is to make sure the region and stakeholders we support receive the best in class service from the team. Presales is an incredible, fascinating, and extremely fast paced environment. It’s difficult to predict how my day will look like from one day to the other, but if I were to identify my core day to day responsibilities, those would be the following:

Make sure all the relevant opportunities our sales teams are working on receive the right support from our Business Development Managers;
Proactively lead internal discussions to understand the opportunities pipeline and top priorities for the week/month/quarter;
Establish and maintain relationships with key stakeholders;
Work as a Business Development Manager on my opportunities; while I cover the role of team lead, I am also operational as Business Development Manager.

What influence did your MCiT Master’s degree program have on your professional career?

The MCiT program gave me a strong competitive advantage to jump start my career. Even before graduating, I was selected to participate in several recruitment processes for major multinational organizations across different industries. I believe the program also gave me a strong base to find a job abroad, in Poland, even though I did not speak the local language.

From the content perspective, the broad knowledge gained through the three main program pillars gave me a solid understanding around the main areas I wanted to focus on during my first work experience after graduation: IT Strategy and Business Development.

Which skills acquired during your MCiT Master’s study are now useful in your job ?

Through the MCiT program I developed a strong knowledge of how complex organizations work, with a strong focus on IT. Being a Business Development Manager in Cisco means working in a complex matrix organization where you are in touch with multiple internal and external stakeholders, at any organizational level. To be successful in this role, I strongly believe you must have multiple skills; amongst them, MCI certainly helped me foster the following:

Soft skills and communications skills, to be able to communicate with any internal and external stakeholders, as well as dealing professionally with difficult customers and carry out effective presentations;
Solid understanding of IT processes as well as developing the right attitude to constantly learn, update yourself, and keep up with the never-ending innovation and change that characterizes the IT industry;
Strong financial acumen, needed to understand the financial drivers for both our Customers and Cisco;
Working under pressure, time-management, and prioritization.

Alberto Ballan‘s background

Born and raised in Italy, Alberto Ballan got his high-school diploma (scientific lyceum) in 2009. From 2009 to 2012 he studied Industrial Engineering (B.Eng) at LIUC-Universita’ Carlo Cattaneo. During that time, he had the opportunity to spend a semester abroad at MCI (Erasmus program).

After his bachelor, he took a short break from studies in order to get some work experience, and worked as Intern at Robert Bosch, in Milan.

From 2013 to 2015 Alberto Ballan studied at MCI (MCiT), and moved to Poland during the 3rd semester via Erasmus+ program, studying at SGGW university in Warsaw. Alberto has been in Poland ever since, working both in Krakow and in Warsaw. He started in Cisco in September 2015, the same month when he graduated from MCI, with honors.