April 26, 2024
Inside the ETA Program: Perspectives from Our Growth Team
This month, we’re shining a spotlight on our latest opening: the Business Development Representative position within our Entry Talent Accelerator Program. As a Business Development Representative, you’ll play a key role in engaging with potential members, strategically prospecting, and showcasing our value proposition.
In this role, you’ll primarily focus on executing outreach to identify and connect with the right prospects. Supported by our structured one-year Entry Talent Accelerator Program, you’ll have opportunities for personal and professional growth in areas such as public speaking, consulting, and data analytics.
To provide you with firsthand insights, we’ve asked some of our team members to share their perspectives. Read on to gain insights and perspectives from the Director of Growth Development and leader of the program, program graduates, and new program members!
Mikal Walcott, Director of Growth Development & Leader of the ETA Program:
What aspect of leading this program do you find most fulfilling or personally rewarding?
“Other professions have the benefit of having pre-professional programs or tracks that you can follow (e.g. medicine, law, consulting). If you want a career that helps you to build business and life skills, it’s harder to know your “track” and where to get the training and practice. What’s most rewarding about this program to me is giving early career professionals an opportunity to build those skills in a structured way with a lot of support, feedback, and mentorship.”
Can you share a significant lesson you’ve learned or a memorable experience you’ve had while managing the program?
“One of the skills we teach as part of the ETA program is how to demonstrate empathy with tone and language, and then simplify complicated information by offering frameworks to help people conceptualize. A memorable experience for me was working on that skill with one of the program participants, and then hearing that they used it both to drive outcomes as a GDA, and in their social life to be a better friend to people making complex decisions. That’s what it’s all about!”
Recent Program Graduates:
As you prepare to transition into your new role, what aspects of the program do you believe have best equipped you to excel in this position?
“Being part of the ETA program has meant having the opportunity to propose and run new company initiatives as well as partner with different teams to better understand the impact that we hope to have on our members. I greatly appreciated being partnered with an incredible mentor on the Partnerships team for an entire quarter because they helped me think more critically about the challenges that our members are experiencing and the ways that we should always be elevating our service to meet their needs. This experience not only prepared me for my transition into the Partnerships team but it also taught me essential incisiveness skills that quickly became useful in becoming an even better Growth Development Analyst!”
Can you share a challenge you faced during the program that turned into a valuable learning experience?
“Learning about a new industry and the inner workings of our company and value proposition was a large undertaking, but I quickly learned how willing my coworkers were to help me get up to speed. I also learned new ways to approach learning, such as crafting hook and value statements that I could use when making phone calls, based on the research I just absorbed.”
New Program Team Members:
Can you share a skill you developed during your first three months in the role that has been especially useful?
“A skill that I’ve developed during my first few months here is informal negotiation. We often connect with people with high outer walls; being able to lead conversations with service and empathy are instrumental in lowering those walls. Being able to navigate a difficult conversation is a skill that I’ve developed at Veris, but have and will continue to use in my life beyond work.”
In your first few months with the program, what aspect of the program or company culture has stood out to you the most, and how do you see it shaping your journey as a growth analyst?
“The autonomy/flexibility of the role allows each of us to take a unique, individualized approach to our work and provides us with a solid foundation to continue to build and innovate upon. Things are constantly changing, iterating, and becoming more sophisticated. The beauty is that you can propose and make that change happen early on in your role.”
Ready to join our team? We welcome you to apply for this exciting opportunity!
