The Micro Focus Sales Academy – Turning Promise into Prospects for Local Graduates

High-caliber graduates and multi-linguists from local universities are benefiting from a major training and induction program based at Micro Focus Belfast in East Bridge Street.

The Micro Focus Sales Academy puts new employees through a demanding 12-week intensive program of sales and product education and training. This year’s recruitment process brought candidates from across Europe, North America and India to Micro Focus Belfast in late June to begin training.

The graduate training covered product, process and tools, and was supplemented with ’on the job’ training, where candidates experienced working as an enterprise business representative working on a campaign within a team, shadowed current sales representatives and actively supported the inside sales team. Each graduate was also allocated 12 Micro Focus customers and required to build and demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of their business needs and IT requirements.

The Sales Academy initiative was created in 2013 and was backed by a mentorship program whereby Micro Focus invested in five new sales manager hires in Belfast and US to provide additional support for the trainees.

This is the second year Micro Focus has run the Sales Academy initiative and all 27 graduates from 2013 have been fully integrated into Micro Focus’ sales teams in US, Northern Ireland, England, Australia and Chile.

This year, the Belfast office has seen 11 new Inside Sales Representatives settle into their assigned territories, 13 new Representatives have returned to Michigan and three to Bangalore.

Mary McDermott, HR Business Partner for Micro Focus, said: “This is a really exciting initiative that is discovering which of our local graduates has the ‘X-Factor’ they need to succeed in the software industry. We’re pleased and proud to be supporting the Micro Focus Sales Academy and the local people who will benefit from it.”

Notes to Editors

• Micro Focus is a leading provider of enterprise application modernization, testing and management solutions.
• The Micro Focus Customer Care team recruits graduates from local universities for roles supporting customers across Europe, North and South America and parts of the Middle East and Asia.
• Micro Focus Belfast employs 130 people, making it the second largest of more than 30 offices around the world.
• A number of employees began their careers as Borland or Segue employees before the Micro Focus acquisition in the summer of 2009.

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization, Testing and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com

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