Case Study in Fast-Track Career Growth

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Five years out of the University of Alabama, where he graduated in business with a concentration in MIS, Sam Moses manages 21 Wal-Mart associates working on synchronizing data with more than 600 U.S. suppliers. And the effort to match electronic product names, descriptions, and attributes between retailer and suppliers, already 2 years old, is going global later this year. With items in the data pool having up to 100 variables that might change depending on the state or country, it's the kind of challenge Moses relishes but didn't expect so soon in his career. "It's not something I mention when I talk to other people I went to college with--they haven't grown into that yet."

Moses says he's probably something of an anomaly in choosing to start his career in Bentonville. "Most African-Americans probably wouldn't say they'd rather live in almost-rural northwest Arkansas, but for me it was knowing my first job would be somewhere where I had an opportunity to grow," he says. And he has, moving from programming to marketing to heading up the Sam's Club dot-com team. He went through the management-training program and now oversees what Wal-Mart calls the item file front-end team.

Says Moses, "What I love about the way our IT group operates is we're not limited to just working on one technology or one individual business silo."

Photo of Wal-Mart courtesy of Knight Ridder