For over 6 years, Yusudi has been addressing the unemployment challenge among the youth through its Academy. When we speak to the youth, most of them aren’t aware of the opportunities for employment and professional growth available in sales. Today we will present to you three statistics that the youth should pay attention to in regards to the growth of sales career as an option.
Photo by Adeboro Odunlami on Unsplash
STAT 1: A 0.7% growth in Business Development jobs in Africa
In a study done by LinkedIn, Business Development and Sales job functions were among the top three job functions trending in Africa between 2011 and 2016. The share of Business Development jobs grew from 9.5 % to 10.2%. On the other hand, the share of Sales jobs experienced a slight decline by 0.1% that is from 8.1% to 8.0% but don’t let this distract you.
STAT 2: A 45% growth in hiring for Business Development and Sales Professionals
Between 2019 and 2020, hiring for business development and sales professionals grew by 45% in a research done by LinkedIn making it one of the top 5 jobs on the rise.
STAT 3: A 9% percentage of Sales jobs listings in Kenya
According to research done by BrighterMonday, sales was among the top three job functions with a high supply of 9%. This means that employers were actively looking to fill in these sales positions and had advertised these jobs for people to apply.
Connecting the dots: Why should you care and what do these stats mean for you?
The business development and sales roles in the employment market are on the rise as they are critical to the business's ability to generate and boost revenue and profits. In fact, in the recently released LinkedIn Top 25 companies to work for in Kenya, sales and business development was the most popular job function across 16 of the listed companies. The likelihood of sales and business development departments being declined redundant or being affected by automation is very low.
Going back to the research done by BrighterMonday, the job functions that had a higher supply than sales were Research, Teaching & Training at 12% and Engineering & Technology at 10%.
For research and engineering, you must have specific educational background for you to qualify for such jobs. What makes sales jobs highly unique is that they don’t require a specific educational background. For
For non-technical sales jobs, you only need a degree or a diploma. It doesn’t matter what you studied. You can study CPA or Procurement and you would still qualify. If you have a technical background like that in IT or Engineering, then you have the added advantage of qualifying for both technical and non-technical sales jobs.
This means that breaking into a sales career is a lot easier than most people think.
With this low barrier to entry in the job market, you should seriously consider giving a sales career a trial by either applying for sales jobs or going through sales career readiness programs like the Yusudi Sales Academy to improve your chances of a long-term career success.