Trevor Manokore’s career has taken some serious zigzags. The tech expert started out training as an engineer before transitioning to a corporate sales role, setting up a couple tech start-ups along the way. But through it all, he’s stayed flexible and open to new and unexpected opportunities.

Since 2004 he’s been at Macquarie Telecom, a large Australian telecommunications and services provider, and he’s now a practice manager, leading a team of consultants in delivering advice to customers and helping the sales team hit its revenue targets. Here he discusses the challenges of stepping from one career path to another and what it's like to work for a telecom giant.

Your career has taken quite the winding path – what qualities, have paid off the most?

For me, it’s been being adaptable when moving from one sphere of work to another. By nature I’m an engineering, technical type, so going across into a commercial role, or a managerial one, has meant I’ve had to learn a whole new set of skills along the way. That’s been a real challenge.

How did you manage the transition from engineering to sales?

It took a while! I had to go through training in order to understand some of the nontechnical, commercial bits. Things like how we calculate margins and sales targeting might seem obvious to those who have been doing them for ages, but not so much to a techie like me.

In my earlier roles, my technical knowledge played a part in almost everything I did. Moving into the commercial side of the business meant pushing that aside and leaving it to others, which took a bit of getting used to.

How have you found being part of a company as large as Macquarie compared with working at a smaller business?

There are a lot of challenges – especially around procedures and routines. At a bigger business, it can feel like these sometimes limit your ability to do what needs to be done. At smaller companies, the decision-making process tends to be quicker and easier.

For example, when you’re hiring someone. In a small firm, there’ll be two interviews, you can say, “I really like this person, they’d be perfect for the role,” fill in a form and you’re done. In a larger organization, you need to involve the human resources team, complete a form just to get approval to interview someone, get your budget approved, send a form to finance…. The list goes on! Just to make one simple decision.

In those situations, the steps in the procedure become like obstacles you can get stuck on. Having worked in smaller companies, I try to bring that experience of streamlined decision-making to my current firm.

You spend your time leading a whole team of consultants and trying to align their goals. How do you maintain a sense of team spirit?

The team that’s working for me are all spread out across Australia. I try to bring them together for training days – recently I ran one in Melbourne. Our normal office didn’t have quite enough space to fit them all, but I was able to make use of another Regus office for a larger room. From a facilities point of view, it always helps having access to another space [on] short notice.

As a team leader, what advice would you give to a young person looking to join a team like yours in the future?

Being open to unexpected opportunities is a surefire way to get places in your career. Sometimes, when you graduate as an engineer, you’re only looking at pure engineering roles. But if you cast your net a little wider, you may well step into something you never realized you had a passion for.

There will be a lot of different roles available that you didn’t know existed. Career counselors at school and university tend to talk about well-known jobs, like lawyers, doctors and engineers, but not about account managers or service delivery managers or a million other careers that are out there. That’s one reason to take a job in a business environment – you can get some experience under your belt, while also working out what else is out there and what opportunities there are.

How do you think technology can make people's lives better?

Technology enables us to live our lives in a better and richer way – whether that’s working from a café and emailing people or Skyping with our faraway family members across the world. I like that my career has been spent contributing to that at least in a little way.

Top tips from Trevor:

1. Look for opportunities outside your traditional field – you might find a passion you never knew you had.

2. Don’t be afraid to take a step sideways. It might mean a bit more training, but it’ll pay off in the long run.

3. Be flexible in your approach to any opportunity.

Macquarie Telecom uses Regus offices in South Yarra, Australia. Learn more about what services Macquarie, Trevor and his team of technologists provide at macquarietelecom.com.