Tech Veteran José van Dijk Looks Back On 25 Years At Cisco

The Silver Anniversary

Cisco veteran José Van Dijk is ringing in 25 years with the San Jose, California-based tech giant this month.

Van Dijk, one of CRN’s Power 100 Most Powerful Women Of The Channel 2022, started her career as a supply chain coordinator for Texas Instruments. She then moved on to manage customer service for Apple before landing at Cisco where she spent the last quarter of a century, holding numerous leadership positions across the globe. Most recently, she served as vice president of operations and partner performance within Cisco’s Global Partner Organization. Before that, she was chief of staff and leader of the transformation office for Cisco’s Customer Experience organization, where she was responsible for alignment of the organization’s strategic initiatives, innovation leadership, and growth. She also established Cisco’s first decentralized Customer Service organizations in Asia-Pacific and Japan.

As of August, she’s taken on a new title: vice president, partner performance and experiences organization. Now, Van Dijk is responsible for managing and improving experiences and the daily business of Cisco partners. She and her team manage partner performance and in the last three years have been busy digitizing processes and tools for solution providers in Cisco’s Global Partner organization, while aligning with Cisco’s field organization.

Suffice it to say, Van Dijk has learned a lot along the way about technology buying behaviors, customer experience, the tight bond that vendors should build with solution providers, and perhaps most importantly, the importance of a strong company culture that cares about its employees inside and outside the workplace.

Van Dijk sat down with CRN to talk about her impressive career and to share advice from the lessons she picked up along the way. What follows are excerpts from the conversation.