Salesforce sends almost 100 staffers to support Career Day

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and on April 30th, a village worth of Salesforce employees descended upon Visitacion Valley Middle School to support its first-annual Career Day.The employees volunteered as career speakers, tech advisors, classroom assistants and event support to entertain and inform hundreds of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students about the world of work.Students learned about careers ranging from programming to poetry in three periods of Career Day speaker sessions. They bonded with Salesforce staff over a Taco Truck-catered lunch on the playground and an array of activities, including sack races, face painting, Double Dutch and basketball. Promising programmers in the school’s Coding Club learned from Salesforce programmers. And, the school’s budding reporters, like Sela, captured the day’s events, taking photos and shooting video of the different activities and interviewing some of the guest speakers.“Today, I had the chance to interview Parker Harris, the co-founder of Salesforce during his first visit to Visitacion Valley Middle School,” Sela said. “He told me about how he met Marc Benioff in 1998, and how they started Salesforce together 16 years ago. But, what I found very interesting during our interview was that in middle school he thought he’d grow up to be a medical pathologist. After the interview, the school streamed a live video of him speaking to all of the homerooms in the school.”Visitacion Valley and Salesforce plan to make Career Day an annual event for students.