I graduated in 2020 with a biology bachelors degree and didn’t do internships in college, so I was unprepared for a job.

I graduated in 2020 with a biology bachelors degree and didn’t do internships in college, so I was unprepared for a job. Last summer, I accepted a full-time job offer, mostly because 1) it was the first FT offer I’d *ever* gotten and TBH months of fruitless indiscriminate job-searching before that had been so discouraging, and 2) I thought it would allow me to start building "professional" experience in general, and maybe in the future it wouldn’t be so discouraging to apply for other jobs if I actually had experience at a company on my resume. It was an “accelerated” technical account manager (TAM) position at a large SaaS company.

I remember during the interview, the hiring manager cast TAM as a great position that gives you “consulting” experience and the chance to build strong relationships with customers and be a “strategic thought partner”. That all sounded great and potentially exciting to me at the time, where my previous work experience had just been two internships at separate remote startups each lasting 3-9 months. I remember taking the job thinking that I would stay at the company for 2-3 years, gain general “professional experience” and learn new skills, and use this as a launching pad for my career.

The first 5 months of the job were actually, literally, doing grunt customer support tickets where your worker metrics were volume-based. This was to “learn the product” and its specialty areas, before becoming a full TAM at the one year mark (the “accelerated” TAM portion; since I didn’t have previous customer management experience, I'd need product knowledge). I started gradually becoming disillusioned, and then that accelerated very quickly.

Customer support is obviously doing customer support, but from my glimpses, even doing TAM work at this company seems like some customer support, dealing with potentially ungrateful or rude external customers, and lots of internal and external meetings that feel pointless. I don’t feel like I’ve learned ANY skills except for learning about the company’s platform (and that’s not a skill).

It’s hard to imagine back now, but I think before I took the job, the idea of getting “consulting” experience for clients seemed appealing, like hey I’ll finally develop something to put on my resume and be employable, and not struggle so much in the future searching for new jobs once I’ve worked here. I honestly did not have any frame of reference for what a TAM does. Now that I do, I’m very seriously thinking about pivoting to data science or software engineering, getting out of this company.

BUT my main question/concern is, how would you define TAM? What does a TAM really do?

Like, what are the key competencies that being a TAM can build? What’s their core job function, and what’s the general career path moving forward? What kinds of skills do TAMs actually build, and what’s a general salary ceiling as a TAM? I want to know what I'm really choosing to cut off if I decide to quit TAM now, so I can judge if I'm ok with not cultivating those skills. ? And also get experienced insight on how customer service-heavy TAM really is.

My impression of it is it’s relationship management and customer support primarily… and to really simplify things, if that’s mainly it, I don’t think I’m interested, but I’d really love to hear how other more experienced professionals view TAM! Has my experience been an anomaly? Thanks so much! :)