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Is Help Desk a Launchpad or a Dead End?
Tracy Mayor writes "Is a gig on an IT help desk really the career death it's always assumed to be? Not always, this Computerworld writer found out, just don't get comfy and stay too long. "
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Use the italics tag much?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Today's my last day at this job doing helpdesk. Moving on to Unix administration. Dead End? For some, probably. For me? Nope.
This summary is full of so much fail.
....NASA?
Your very own guide to salary.....oh subscription huh? pfft
Help desks that push call times and scripts over fixing stuff the right way are a Dead End and good tech people will fail at it and it can lead to you losing good techs.
Putting a lot TPS report BS in the help desk is also a bad sign.
There ones that say help desk but you also do network, desktop, imaging, roll outs and other takes as well.
I thought it was good experience from a "oh crap everything broke what do I look at first" perspective. The troubleshooting skills were definitely worth it. Then again, I did my 3 years in help desk during college, and avoided it like the plague after graduation.
I'd also like to add that the HDI certifications are a joke.
Is working at Burger King as a teenager a launchpad or a dead end? I guess it depends on your attitude, your ambition, and your ability to learn from experiences.
Any work dealing with customers will prepare you well for working in any kind of environment where you have to deal with people that are sometimes unreasonable or like to treat others like garbage. In other words, it prepares you to deal with real life. Help desk has the added bonus of being somewhat related to tech stuff, so if you combine it with some learning on your own time, maybe you can end up in a more technical role.
Most companies will tend to recruit from within, so if they see that you're highly technically competent and are good at dealing with people, you're likely to get moved up out of help desk if you make it known that your ultimate goal is, say, system administration (and God help you if it is). If you sit around talking shit about the idiot customers all day when you're not on the phone, you're probably not going anywhere except possibly the unemployment line.
In short, any job will give you what you're willing to get from it. Whether any particular job is a dead end or a door leading to bigger and better things is entirely up to the person doing the job.
On a personal note, I was in help desk for 6 months before being promoted to Unix admin. I got there because I saw a very clear need for improvement in the servers at the company (their Windows mail server was crashing constantly) and I presented a plan to improve things with a Unix-based design and showed I had the technical ability to pull it off. So, they gave me the opportunity, I got the job done, and they promoted me. If you have the drive, any position can be a springboard.
The "added bonus" is a site you have to register for. Ass.
As for helpdesk, depends on the organization. Pretty much any position could be career-building or dead end depending on the organization and where it's going.
IT seems to get little love in general and helpdesk gets none in particular. I think that it would more often than not be a dead end but it really should be more of a stepping stone in the ideal world. For the new guy just coming into the field, that's the first place he can be of real use. That's what my dad always called the "parts washer" position in the garage. The first place you stick the new kid is on parts washing because it's a useful task and not even a monkey could fuck it up. If the kid shows he can show up and do his job for the first month, then you start taking the time to show him other tasks. Usually your fuck-up will have fucked up at some point in the first month and will be gone so you never wasted your time on training him on anything.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
My god... it's full of FAIL!
I write sci-fi for metalheads
It is a great place to start in IT. Desktop support is another place that is a great entry level job. Going from a sysadmin position to helpdesk would be suicide...
The ultimate help desk job was being Bill Gates' technical assistant. There really was such a job, and one of the people who held it now is in charge of the entire Microsoft Office product line.
Every person I've ever worked with that hadn't worked helpdesk was a tool. They had no ability to deal with users. They were sloppy because they (consciously or not) figured someone else would have to deal with the aftermath. And they had an attitude when it came to doing the periodic shit-work that always comes up and doesn't require a brain, just a pair of hands.
I've been working one sh*tty help desk job to the next ever since getting out of school four years ago. I've been trying to get into server administration unix/windows and received several certifications but I only receive letters back from people interested in putting me into another dead end help desk job.
To me I feel working in help desk positions has pretty much been a case of terminal brain cancer for my career.
Having started my IT career in helpdesk, I give the following advice (actually my $.02)
1. Stay away from outsourcing firms!! Besides being a dead-end job, they'll most likely move their call center operations to India sooner or later.
2. If the you work for the company in-house helpdesk (in my case, a major OEM), it's definitely a NASA launchpad. Work hard, harder, get promoted to a management position in the call center, then you can perhaps move to other areas within the company.
3. If help desk is really your thing (honestly, some people love it), you can start your own call center and work for other SMBs.
The trick is to work help desk somewhere that the help desk is meaningful, where you get to do lots more than just answer a phone and read a tree. For instance, I spent two years under "help desk" hacking Perl every day.
Any job is a dead end if you take it as an excuse to stagnate and never learn anything beyond what's needed for competent performance.
The trouble with help desk is the reputation as help desk -- you have to be able to convince people that you know something beyond the job title. Of course, file that under "resume-cold-calling is hard." You would be well-advised to take on as much responsibility outside your limited official purview as you can handle. If you don't know how to do it yet, know that you'll learn it, and offer to do so at every opportunity. Make sure that you have specific, quantifiable achievements that you can point to, and make sure that someone with some clout at the company -- maybe your manager, maybe the manager of someone you're helping, who knows, but someone worth listening to -- is aware of what you've accomplished and can vouch for it when you apply for your next job.
Help desk, approached smartly, can be a great place to start building diverse skills and making connections for future recommendations. Just don't let yourself get pigeonholed and don't get trapped in bad politics.
Oh, and I'm assuming you mean help desk somewhere you can talk with people who aren't. If you can't, you can't do much other than show off for the other drones.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I have found my help desk experience to be essential in many aspects of my career. Being able to keep a level head, even when you are in the right, is essential in the business world, especially if you are looking to do any independent software development where you will not only be coding, but also providing support to end-users, many of which lack basic understanding of computers. When you are able to communicate efficiently and politely with your customers, it goes a long way in building and maintaining a strong userbase.
Besides doing my best in the job, and all of these things, I was also searching for a development job within the company.
Less than 2 years after I started as tech support, I am now a developer of a different product within the company.
Its not always a dead end, it is if you make it. There were a few people that will always work in that position because they don't want to move on.
Things to do in tech support if you want to move on to something else.
- Excel at the current position - Do your best, this will look good at whatever you are looking at
- Let your manager know - This depends on the company and your manager. Some managers will help to move you on, others won't.
- Find opportunities to do what you want - If you want to get into development, find opportunities to write something that will help the current job.
- Actively search for new positions - This is after the minimum time set for a position that the company sets. This way the division doesn't lose any money on their investment in you.
Remember you need to show initiative, and try to move on.As mentioned in this article (at least 20 times), it all depends on the organization. In some, helpdesk is it. You don't go much further. In others, they want to promote people.
In my case, I did an 18 month stint supporting a proprietary case management system (for the State court system). By the time I left, I knew every screen in the app and when people would call in with a question or a problem, I didn't have to look at the screen to know what they were talking about.
I took that knowledge and went into a program (still with the State) where you served one year and did rotations in networking, helpdesk, programming and web design at different agencies. At the end of the year, you were placed with an agency.
Since then, I've kept learning new skills (despite the best efforts of some of those around me to prevent that) and have been working my way up the food chain. I'm trying to get into a management position to bring some organization to things but am still being thwarted.
Helpdesk is what you make of it. Either you do well and get ahead or you sit on your ass and bitch about stupid users.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Getting stuck has little to do with the profession, and more to do with the person in question.
Helpdesk is a good place to start. It's not much, but it's something. People who never try to get anything better or are not qualified for anything better are usually the ones who are stuck there.
Calling it career death is like saying that any other job is career death. Any experience you add to your curriculum vitae is likely to place your application higher in the deck even if it is helpdesk. Granted, that depends on the job you're applying for, but I see no reason for people to get stuck there. If you don't like it, quit. A friend of mine did, and I doubt that he's gonna have great difficulties getting a job once he's done with his education.
If you have the right qualifications, helpdesk need not be a career killer.
Like anything else, and what others have already mentioned, the key is not to be satisfied in mediocrity and not let yourself staff. Personally, I used to work in a helpdesk job, but my experiences and attitude spoke to better roads. I personally never stay satisfied with mediocrity and as such, keep myself moving career-wise.
But like the burger king comment, it really depends on the person. I know lots of people who've started in helpdesk positions and have gone on to bigger and better things.
Some of the skills learned at an IT help desk are extremely worthwhile, and very portable. For example, the ability to speak in an accent so incomprehensible that after only a minute or two, the person at the other end will utter a soundless cry of inchoate fury and slam down the phone. This invaluable skill can get a telemarketer off the line when even an air horn fails.
If your training includes that particular accent so thick that even a fellow East Asian shakes his head and says, "Huh?", you can pretty much write your own ticket. At the very least, you are virtually guaranteed of a very well-paid position taking calls for the IRS.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
- Never stay at a job too long. Raises don't keep up, jumping ship for more money does
- Never say "I don't know how to do that". Instead, say, "I'm not sure how to do that, it will take some time for me to read up on it"
- There is no such thing as wasted time. You get paid the same whether the project gets tossed or not. Learn something from it and move on. It's the company's problem they are going to waste money, not yours.
- Get rid of the ego and listen, you might learn something
- Ask questions instead of dictating. 'My way is better because' arguments aren't received as well as "I'm not sure I understand, can you explain why doing x is better than doing y??"
- Never be the last one out of a sinking ship, your loyalty will probably not be rewarded.
- Learn something new all the time. When you understand networks and databases and telephone systems and several languages and how business works and how investors operate, you become valuable. Only knowing how to code Java makes you a code monkey.
- Accept the fact you don't know everything, and question your knowledge in everything you think you are an expert in.
I think these work regardless of whether someone is in a help desk, development, systems, or management role.I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
But not a dead end either. It's more of an impediment to your technical career. Take it from a guy who fucked up his job interview and had to spend 1.5 years in QA (the offer was too good to turn down). Even though I worked as a developer before I took that job and I've been a developer for over six years after that stint, it's still a big fat albatross on my neck, because every time someone sees my resume they all have the same question - WTF? No matter what I say in response, they'll think I'm not as good as the other guy who doesn't have a QA position on his resume, and I have to work twice as hard to convince them otherwise. Had I known back then what I know now, I would never have taken that position. And having support on your resume is an order of magnitude worse than QA.
For some people, it's a lifelong career. For me, I had a job that was partially helpdesk work when in college, and now I'm mostly done with my CS PhD.
I was doing support for device drivers for a while. I was being paid $35/hour to help in dealing with device driver problems (much of it was on the development side). This is the exception. Of course in the old days, when I called the help desk for SoftIce, I would get the company founders (I was using version .99).
Of course help desks today are manned by someone laughs when they say, "oh the software is not supposed to let you do that" after it wiped your hard drive. (Avanquest Partition Commander).
Fight Spammers!
When I was in charge, I looked at the help desk as a way to get people the basic skills and familiarity so they could move up in the company. I aimed for twelve to eighteen months of having them on my team and then helping them move into the area of their choice. Less than twelve and I wasn't getting a return on my training, more than eighteen showed lack of initiative.
The company where I had this working the best had an informal procedure for moving help desk people onto project teams. One of the project managers would ask me out to lunch. Over Arby's we would discuss the need and who I had that would fill it.
Why Arby's? We liked it, it was close, and then it became tradition. Many a career was launched over a roast beef sammich.
What I've noticed over the years is that the managers aren't as interested in using the help desk as a way to bring people in. The help desk where I'm currently working is really nothing but phone jockeys. It's a little better now that remote control is more pervasive but I still can't see them moving up any more. Which is really a shame.
A year or two on a decent help desk will give you the troubleshooting skills you need, as well as get you familiar with a corporate environment.
In the voice of Kosh, "yes".
I remained passionate and driven, and moved around enough to be exposed to myriads of technologies. Volunteered lots of time to F/OSS and non-profit causes (still do) to keep sharp, busy, and seasoned.
I really feel that all of these little pieces add to success, for any IT pro who insists on professional growth.
Total: $0.02
Help desk is almost always a great launch pad. It's also a great indicator of what kind of company you're working for.
If you land in the help desk in a decent sized company, and have any brains at all, you're out in a year, 18 months tops. On the flip side, if you end up a shitty company. You'll know within six months, and be working someplace else in 12.
People that have been help desk for five+ years scare me.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
The face time with directors, programmer managers, and other higher-ups proved invaluable. I now have a nice set of references and developed good professional relationship with those people. It helps to be competent and not a bullshitter, too. Some people would be surprised on how quickly others pick up on that stuff.
No subscription, but it only lists ten major cities as of June 16, 2007. Better than nothing.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
But usually their heads are bigger than their actual "SKILZ" related to independant thought are lacking. I justb really don't want any free-range "hackerzx" having access to my servers and network. Nope...
Just as there is a place for someone who can take care of my need to super-size a burger order, so is there a need for monkeys to unlock email accounts.
Fact: Having a CS degree shows that you can follow instructions from other *people*, have a grasp of things beyong rote knowledge of keystrokes, and can manage without a GUI. Help Desk Monkeys don't have these "skilZ".
The linked salary guide in the blurb goes to a subscription.
There is a small salary guide in the article, I think that should have been linked to instead.
--- Ãther SPOON!
Frankly, I think every person who wants to work in IT should spend at least a year on the helpdesk.
In my experience, the number one problem with IT is that the programmers and managers really don't have enough interaction with the end users to understand their side of things. Every time there's an outtage because someone kicked the cord out of a server, or every patch that breaks usability in the name of some wizzbang feature, it really falls on the helpdesk to manage and do damage control while you're out "on break".
To the rest of the company, the helpdesk is literally the face of the IT department. They're the ones who get to deal with irate customers, desperate password seekers, and the social manipulators.
On the help desk, you learn every quirk of every system your company supports. You learn all the "unofficial" tricks that get things done, regardless of policy or procedure. Most importantly, you learn who to call when situations arise you can't handle. You know *everyone*, so that when application Z is causing catastrophic system failures on your server farm you know exactly who to go to to make it stop.
I work for one of the 5 largest independent software vendors in the world. We sell a help desk product, which accounts for the lionshare of revenue in that product category.
If you're starting off in the help desk, be aware that working in a help desk is part of a much larger ecosystem known as IT Service Management. If you're interested in furthering your career, explore as much information around the ITSM space as possible, especially as it relates to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process framework.
According to Gartner, of those publicly traded companies which have revenues in excess of $1 billion/yr, 90% of them either have implemented an ITIL process framework, are in the process of implementing one, or are strongly considering implementing one. ITSM is a huge marketplace, with tons of opportunity, and few active practitioners who are both experienced and forward thinking. It's a perfect place to write your own ticket and have a strong future in IT, as well as work with multi-national companies in shaping how they manage IT.
Recognizing the help desk's (or Service Desk) place in this ecosystem will help you parlay your position into having a role in shaping how IT organizations define, build, launch, operate and improve IT Services back to their customers.
Service Desk forms a critical part of an IT organization, where Incidents, Problems and Changes are managed and communicated. Known how Change interacts with Release and Configuration Management. Know how these in turn work in tandem with Capacity, Availability, Service Level Management, etc.
ITSM professionals are in demand. I'm currently hiring 4 ITSM professionals, whose salaries are in the $125k - $150k range. Many of the individuals currently working for me started off in help desk. It's all about your own personal initiative. If you see a help desk gig as a dead end, it will be. However, if you can see the larger picture, you can work your way up to a very rewarding and profitable career in IT Service Management.
I could not agree more. Various technical skills can be taught/learned, but people skills are so often overlooked by people on specific career paths. If there is 1 essential skill to any job, it is good people skills. This means not only learning to deal with difficult customers (as you alluded to in the "BK Lounge" analogy) but also learning to manage people (this includes managing UP as well as managing DOWN).
I wasn't thrilled at the time to be working at several of the crappy jobs I had in my younger days (dry cleaner, JC Penney, maintenance tech, etc) but I was at least able to recognize opportunities to improve myself by learning at each one.
I started out as a workstation helpdesk jockey, driving from school to school doing basic workstation, network, and server duties. Nothing too fancy, just repairing older PIIs and PIIIs, adding users into a Novell environment, and patching/unpatching ports as needed. The nice side was being able to drive locally, get reimbursed for mileage at a decent rate, and getting close to the staff members and faculty at each of the 5 schools I had. The downsides were the two inept helpdesk managers (one who had an inferiority complex coupled with a bad Chinese accent that no one could understand).
Their manager was even more inept. Imagine an entomologist who couldn't find work in his field so he joined IT management. He loved bugs and he would have made a damned fine entomologist given a chance, but his IT skills were pretty bad and his interpersonal skills were even worse.
I left the school district after a year and a half after I got a position as a helpdesk manager for higher education. The helpdesk was fairly new and I was given free reign to do what I needed to do to make it better. For my first year and a half things were great - desktop and phone support were being handled well and the network admin decided to show me the ropes of Active Directory. I first started out with DHCP and printer setups with static IPs, then as I progressed I started doing rights assignments and creating shares on our network for people. Things were handled very well - a call to the helpdesk was generally resolved within a few minutes.
Then, one afternoon, someone decided that the giant beast that comprised a different aspect of local higher education thought the state had a similar mission as us and, as a cost-savings measure that has yet to save any costs, we were merged with The Beast. The Beast had a relatively enterprisey helpdesk system (read: unempowered and unknowledgeable), a server admin (Mordak) with an ego that would allow no-one access to anything, a policy that completely disabled DHCP within the building, thus crippling customer service and support when a machine was upgraded or a NIC was replaced (because, of course, I could not add a static IP to their system. I might make a mistake).
The Beast, under the direction of a new CIO, has now a semi-fixed ITIL-based desk being built now. Their helpdesk is taking over my roles and I am being promoted (with due difficulty, jealousy, and lack of guidance) to manage an new helpdesk that focuses simply on our online program and, at the same time, manage the file server and LAN at our soon-to-be own building. None of this happened without a fight from me however: The stigma of 'helpdesk manager' simply meant (to these feeble IT folk) that I could never be trusted to do anything important as, say, order and manage a file server, construct a basic LAN, work with outside contractors and electricians, and construct a small but well-designed server room. No, instead, they (including the CIO and the Mordak wanna-be) tried to block the acquisition of a server and said that all of the servers we'd need should be centralized and that they'd handle everything. This coming from the people who left a critical enterprise web server offline for an entire weekend despite knowing about the issue on Friday! After the server situation was sorted out I ams till expected to adhere to 'guidelines' that are specifically directed at us and not at the other campuses we have spread across the state. I think, to finally make the transition, I'll need to be out of sight (site), out of mind.
My point is, if you are in a helpdesk position and you want to grow out of it, be prepared to stand up for what you need and what you know. IT folks, for some reason, get very territorial and hate to see any plebe who has actually talked to customers and displayed human empathy go into a world dominated by crass badasses who'd rather lock themselves in a server room and caress a Cisco 6505 all day. I am in the middle of all of this now and I can't wait to just be done with it and do my new job without constant harassment and degradation.
"This food is problematic."
This is going to sound very cliche, but your success is what you make of it. Help desk can be either, or. 13 years ago when I got my start, it was definitely a launch pad. I imagine the landscape of the help desk has changed quite a bit since then, and may even require a little bit more effort, but it can still be a launchpad.
Here are salary results from : http://www.indeed.com/salary/Help-Desk-Technician.html
Help Desk Technician
$33,000
IT Help Desk Technician
$30,000
Help Desk Support Technician
$32,000
Help Desk Technician Tier
$28,000
Hardware Support Technician
$33,000
Fire Dispatcher
$38,000
PC LAN Technician
$32,000
Customer Service And Management
$27,000
Helpdesk Technician
$32,000
Technical Support Technician
$33,000
Sales & Marketing Associate
$44,000
If you work help desk in a large company, then there may be problems getting the peripheral experience that helps move into other roles.
However, in a small company, the help desk staff may also end up working on the company website, helping debug programs, systems administration, and so on, because they'll be amongst the more technical staff.
With some additional experience under your belt in an area of greater interest, you can then move in that direction - whether jumping fully into that role, or just into a position that specifically mixes support and, say, development, and then use that as the next step in your chosen IT career.
Additionally, small businesses you're more likely to be in a position of managing a small team of other support staff if you stick with them for a while, and can then move towards management if that's more your preference.
13 years ago, I worked in Technical Support for a fairly large company that sold database software and DB development tools. It's basically help desk but for external customers rather than internal users. This was in the tech bubble, when everyone was trying to hire people constantly.
Your whole day is spent with technical users or their managers (in our case, DBAs or developers) calling you to help them with problems they're having. If you were particularly bright, helpful, or sometimes just polite, you'd get offered a job. They just seemed to assume that they needed your skills, because if they had it in-house already, they wouldn't have had to call you.
The job also started with a couple of months of training on every product the company sold before you even hit the phones. In this company, patches were also handled by Support. So as I advanced, I got to fix bugs, port the product to different flavors of unix, and teach lots of classes.
It was a great first job that set me up for a career as a database developer and data architect.
I think you need 2, maybe 3 gigs at least, and upgrade your processor as well.
When I started out on a call center help desk 10 years ago, we used to kid the desk side support guys that we could thier job blindfolded, and we did. No RDP, or VNC and rarely PC Anywhere.
:-)
Anybody who could quickly resolve problems over the phone was moved up to remote network support, and much better pay. It might take 18 months to get out but it was well worth it.
10 years later I am a well paid consultant. I support those who support. The cycle continues
I am also super nice to anyone answering the phone in any call center. I've seen it from their end of the line.
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
I always thought it was a launchpad *to* a dead end. YMMV.
My "Help Desk Support" position is so much more, like you said... and I'm making a good bit of money more at this new position in an engineering firm than my friend who manages IT for a local TV station for 3 years! So while it says "Help Desk" on my resumé, I'll be able to prove it was oh so much more than that.
Helpdesk is not a dead end. Unless you have a victim mentality. I've worked my way up from the helpdesk at several companies and passed by a lot of the helpless helpdesk victims. Now I work at my dream job doing information security for a large government contractor. Some tips to pass on:
1. Find a company or industry you want to work in, then join their help desk.
2. Find a company with college tuition benefits and who will pay for certifications.
3. Get some certifications towards the area you want to work in.
4. Let them pay for your college and educate yourself into a better job!
Also, general company wisdom. If you have a problem with no solution, you are a troublemaker. If you have a problem with a solution, you are a mover and shaker!
Yopu for you?
I scanned this whole thread. NOT ONE had a score higher then 1. Yes its a dead end. No one on slashdot went back to rate this.
Unix admins/apps programmers/ and other lofty sorts see it as a dead end so it is, Such are the population here so QED. Most of these articles say something like: "I worked the HD for 6 months then got promoted and.."
FEW remarks come from dedicated tech support pros. People who have worked a desk long enough to know the quirks, know the tricks, know how to keep peopel productive. Remarks seem to come mainly from those who see it as a bad experience (The Burger King remarks below) to be through on your way to greatness, not a destination in its own right. I work tech support and have for years. All I need do to ruin a sysadmin's day is call in sick.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
I climbed out in the 90s and am now a Sr. Developer. Smaller companies are the way to go. You have more opportunity to work on side projects. Also, don't be afraid to change companies. If you are doing some cool things in the help desk but IT doesn't even want to look at it, you need to look at other companies where you can come in as a Junior Developer.
Other things to note. If you're working for a company that does contract and outsource help desk, make sure it's the kind where you are on-site. There's a lot more opportunity when you're part of mid sized company. I would shy away from places like geek squad. Your reputation could get tied to the reputation of the company as a whole. It could be a mixed bag.
The last thing you want is to be in a 250+ person help desk. Limited opportunity, and the cultures usually value conformance. Upwards paths are limited to supervisor/manager duties for the help desk. Think small!
I cannot stress enough, be willing to skip around between employers to get what you want.
I'm 2 years in this Help Desk job and the amount learned is quite invaluable to me. 2 reasons : there were other tasks involved like light server administration tasks, and secondly, I was proactive about learning new things.
I started on the help desk for a financial software company. It took me a little less than a year to get poached by a hedge fund I dealt with every day. Now I'm sitting on a trading floor gaining loads of experience not related to computers at all. Basically, I've shifted gears and am on track for a trader oriented role.
Granted, I spent a lot of time doing quantitative work with clients to back up the software, but I basically answered phones all day (in jeans and a t-shirt, how I miss that).
For a niche skill set, with great people skills, you can definitely get yourself in the backdoor of some firms. You're greatest ally is the boutique firm with no huge IT infrastructure.
-----Zephyre
There's a huge difference between manning the helldesk at a giant corporation vs a small firm. In the former case, you're likely an expendable resource little better than a sweatshop worker. In the latter, you have the opportunity to interact with other depertments and management in the course of your duties, and impress them. If all you company knows about you are you're handling times, you're going nowhere. If the sales reps bring you cookies and half the VP's come to you for favors, you have some opportunities to explore.
I was trained in CS (at a very reputable university) and had some trouble finding a job right out of graduation because I didn't have much "real world" programming experience. However there was one company that I really wanted to work for. They were small, right down the road, and there stuff was all Linux based. They unfortunately were not looking for developers at the time. So I took an entry level support tech position and less then a year later the head of R&D found me and brought me over to his team. I've been there ever since and could not be happier. It was the EXACT position I was looking for when I got out of college, but I had to get my foot in the door first.
:)
I recommend this plan of action under the following conditions:
* The company is small(ish) and growing quickly
* You are confident of your skills and think you really could provide more value for the company in another position once you have your foot in the door
That being said, I had better get back to work
I did a stint on the Compuserve/AOL help desk in college (in the 90s heydey of dial-up). I technically worked in the cancellations department, and my job was to "Save" accounts by convincing people not to cancel. I saved countless accounts by helping people quickly and easily fix common dial-up issues or re-install TCP/IP in Windows 95/98/Me. I was of course eventually fired for going "off-script" since there was no script for actually fixing a computer... even though I was successfully convincing people not to cancel the account that they couldn't even log onto. When I started the job there was no script. Once they handed out scripts it got pretty absurd and rather pointless to even take the call. The scripts were worded so that you were basically saying "I'm not going to cancel your account" in a way that sounded like you said "I just canceled your account." As long as the customer said "okay" you were supposed to keep the account active, hang up, and call it a save. I never did that, and had much more success anyway. During a good week I would save 300 accounts, snagging a $1 per acct bonus plus hourly wages (15 - 20 hours at MAYBE min. wage if I remember correctly). This was WAY more saves than anyone else in the office who didn't know the first thing about actually fixing a customer's problem. My call times were a bit longer than other employees, but my save rate was FAR higher. I earned enough to buy a car before getting fired, which was all I was there for anyhow. AOL basically didn't care about fixing problems, they just wanted you to convince the customer to put the account on "hold" so that next time they opened IE and it automagically dialed in, the customer would be charged for an account they thought they had closed.
I've done help desk (Internet technical support) for most of my career... because I enjoy it. My hope for my future career is not to leave phone support, but to get a job as server or hardline support. I actually enjoy helping noobs just as much as helping tech experts, but you get paid a lot more for helping people with real problems.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I was happily working as a desktop support engineer, when suddenly my employer sent me off to be the technical lead on a client's Help Desk. At the time, I really dreaded the move.
However, I was able to make a lot of progress for the client -- standardizing Help Desk procedures, documenting handoff procedures to (and responsibilities of) other teams within IT, and coming up with some technical stuff they hadn't even imagined. (Two words: "batch file").
Then, in 2003, my company tried to sell the client on a Windows XP image project... and they agreed, provided that I was the lead engineer! My company objected, because I had never done such a project, but the client insisted: me, or nobody.
I ended up designing a very successful XP image (and its creation process) for several thousand desktops, and became my company's lead XP Image Design SME.
The client's main reason for insisting I lead the project: they knew I was intimately familiar with the type of calls their Help Desk was receiving from the old Win2K image, and figured I would eliminate enough Help Desk calls to pay for the entire project over time.
Coming from someone who happens to be right at home working at Help Desks, I can't help but feel somewhat insulted by your "career death" line.
Jerk.
you can say help desk / what other tasks that you do on the resumé
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Yyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssss
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
I'm working for a very large telco and after 17 months as a help desk tech I got promoted to a regular sysadmin position (no tape-monkey stuff). I hold NO certs (other then ITIL ...) but guess what, all those recommendations coming from the CTO and most technology directors really helped a lot ... Without those .. i would have not stood a chance.
And I also learned how to interact with people much better :). This is an invaluable skill and they don't teach it in school.
Like many, many jobs out there, help desk is what you make of it. I started at a help desk while I was still in college and now I work as a DBA. If I had relied on the company I was with when I started I would have stayed at the help desk or at best become a manager. Instead, I continued taking college classes while I worked there, pursued promotions, and certifications. What I learned at the help desk and on Tech Support gave me some basic knowledge to help get the certifications and work experience I needed to get the next job, which helped me get the one after that. If you expect your company to train you, you likely won't move up much but if you aggressively seek new opportunities then the help desk can give you the basics and track record you need to move up.
So internal help desks that benefit from solving problems more than from keeping calls short are good.
Where as help desks that benefit from keeping calls short and call volume high, are bad.
Great, so now find me a help desk that could say they are the first option, because I've never seen it.
I worked for Stream intl. http://www.stream.com/ many years ago. All I can say is, if your company does business with an outfit like this, they are NOT doing themselves any favors.
Stream (at one time or another) handled support for Dell, Gateway, Dell ISP, Gateway ISP, @home, 3com, merril-lynch, and many many others.
They are not good at it. Their turn over is something like 200% in a year. More in certain divisions.
When I was on the Dell team, the day shift turnover was 500% in 6 months. The night shift was considerably more stable, largely due to the managers all being at the bar next door by 4pm and not coming back in until 10am or so. Not having some jack ass with a business degree looking over your shoulder secretly, and then calling you on every possible thing makes for a much less stressful environment. I worked there for exactly 1 year, and had 3 different "managers". I only met one of them, the day he fired me. (for not showing up on a saturday. Fri-Sat-Sun were my days off from day one, I didn't bother to argue)
On Dell support, 16 minutes was supposed to be the call average. 16!!!!!! minutes to diagnose a windows machine, fix it and confirm it works. Over the phone. With your grandmother. Good luck. BTW, 16 minutes was a stream thing, dell didn't care how long it took because they paid by the call, not the time.
Helpdesk tends to reward renaissance, jack of all trades types in a market that is typically a specialists market.
This is it's own advantage and disadvantage - the advantage is that you get to see more of an organization - I work for a corporate helpdesk here in the U.S. that goes toe to toe with the Indian companies by justifying our greater expense with stronger customer service and a range of skills. I have talked to clients in Japan, Germany, Korea,China, Mexico - well, just about everywhere, doing just about everything, (Including having a long drawn out conversation about U.S. foreign policy and economic factors versus India and China with someone while I got his copy of notes working before he went to a diplomatic reception. I enjoyed it - he may have considerd me a parochial hick, but *I* had fun).
The disadvantage is that to shine as a specialist, you need to be *damn* good across a pretty narrow, well defined range that you can study up on day to day. To be good enough at helpdesk to shine, you have to be *pretty darn* good across a broad range of badly defined and overlapping skills.
It's certainly not a *safe* route to advancement - it requires an eclecticism not rewarded most other places. But if you have it, you can do fairly well at it.
Or, at least I feel I'm doing okay at it.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
...what are your career goals?
If you intend to continue working at the wage you are currently earning and you have no intention to move into another area then I'd say you've succeeded at reaching that goal!
If, on the other hand, your goals are more money with new and interesting challenges then remaining in a Help Desk position which has no opportunities for growth may not in your best interest.
I have worked in the IT field for over 15 years and I have worked for companies where there is absolutely no upward mobility as well as those in which any opportunity is available if you want it. It is true that in the latter type of company career growth is dependent on the corporate environment, the type of work that is performed, and how ambitious the Help Desk employee is. In general though, it is mostly up to the individual how far they wish to go in any job.
There is always a point at which one should ask themselves if continuing at their present position has the potential for getting them where they want to ultimately be. If the answer to this question is ever 'no' then it may be time to brush up on that resume and start looking for new opportunities. I've done it and it has generally worked out for the better for me, as long as I've kept in mind that the next opportunities depend on my efforts.
Take your mod and shove it!
I'm curious as to how anyone could get comfy on a helpdesk. Christ, after working on one of those god-forsaken hellholes and being fucked day after day with my pants on, I wept tears of joy when they fired me.
Hmmm, that's interesting you say that.
Not that I want to be chained to a help desk and treated like a slave, but a quick scan of level 1 jobs here in Australia reveals advertised gross wages around 41-43K + 9% super ($AU, super is not taxed, universal health cover (UHC) is a 1.5% tax, 4 weeks paid vacation is the legal minimum and is always included in gross figures). So let's say $45K gross and an Aussie dollar is worth around $0.90 US. That makes it a little over $40K US gross on the first few jobs I found advertised. I don't know what the take-home pay would be in the US but on $40K (not including super) you would pay ~10K tax including UHC.
Total cost of employment including desk space, utilities, insurance, blah, blah, would be at least twice that amount. Unemployment insurance doesn't come into the picture in Australia because we have an "minimum effort to find a job limit" rather than a maximum time limit on social security payments, only people with well paid jobs (yours trully:) bother to take out private unemployment insurance.
Perhaps this is why we Aussies often refer to ourselves as "The land of Oz", we really are in an alternate universe!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The simple fact is that even if you have qualifications they are useless without experience so you have to get a helpdesk job, that is if you aren't a programmer, but in the tech side. I also don't understand why people stay in the position when an unskilled receptionist gets the same wage (at least where I work) when you have to deal with the stupidest people, constantly, and cop flack from "know it alls" on a daily basis.
Your resume will be radioactive with that stain on it.
Say you were in Prison instead.
Or just flat out lie and say you are a network tech.
Seriously you need to move anywhere else NOW.
Get a job with Geek squad if that's all you can get.
Don't take another pure help desk position.
Find a small company where you'll wear many hats, but have a non-help desk job title.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Unless your company makes money off your work don't expect to be treated like a rock star. Even if you develop profitable products expect to be treated like a rock star in the 50s. That is to say learn to negotiate with weasels.
Better technical people seek out companies that make money doing technical things.
Working for banks etc on internal software is only a stepping stone to better things, crunchier problems and fatter paychecks.
If your companies ultimate product is a commodity the company will be run by the marketing department.
In the long run most products turn into commodities, so don't get too comfortable anywhere.
It is that simple.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
[ ] Launchpad
[ ] Dead End
[X] Rest Stop
In so many ways...
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Helpdesk is typically a dead end job at your current employer - but can be excellent resume fodder for your next. And if its the only thing you're qualified for (lack of experience, education, or both...) it could be a great place to start and build some skills.
I worked at a major ISP helpdesk for a period of time while I finished my college degree. It was a good place gain experience in the basics of computer troubleshooting remotely with people (some glad to talk to a human, others just dumber than a bag of hammers).
Regardless, there was no place to go - even when I graduated. They offered me a new position but they already knew my low wage and insisted on low balling my job offer.
I declined and went to work for another company for more money and better benefits doing the same as the promotion I declined.
So when you're moving off the helpdesk - do a reality check before you accept your new wage and see what the going rate for the new job is. Don't let them give you a token bump in pay - chances are you'll be well under the average pay. You're valuable to them because you're already familiar with the company and their processes... use that as a negotiation bullet point. Stick to your guns and don't be afraid to let them "think on it".
I started off on a helpdesk back in 1997 (Within five minutes of starting I was given root access to SCO systems, with very little knowledge of UNIX! More fool them, but lucky for me; being thrown in at the deep end was a good way to learn even though I could have caused god knows untold amount of damage, but luckily I didn't.). There were a couple of people like me who came and went. Some of them were older people, in their late forties, early fifties, one being an ex TV repair man; so I guess this job to him was neither a launch pad or dead end; just a means to an end. I'd bet he's still there. So that helpdesk was my launch pad to better things (mainly better paid jobs. I'm a Linux Sys Admin now and happy doing this for the foreseeable future.
Me: What are you using Netscape, Outlook Express?
Luser: Wordpad.
Me: Face palm... Do you have the box your computer came in?
I hate help desk with a passion. 90% of end users are too lazy and /or dumb to own a computer. I'll stick pins in my eyes before I do that shit ever again.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
The only real obstacles to progressing from this kind of role are either not enough or too much ambition(ie folks who don't care and don't try and folks who think that having done a year of help desk makes them qualified to be sys admins).
Working in a call centre(ie a place where all you do is take and log calls, maybe follow a few scripts etc) is dead end work, because it's not IT work.
It also tends to be outsourced to companies that don't do anything but call centre work and where there's no real technical progression path.
Basically speaking Help Desk, or even Call Centre work is a good way to prove you have some real world technical experience, it won't get you a job you're not qualified for, but it will make getting on you are qualified for slightly easier, presuming of course you didn't take a massive step straight down to take it, and of course presuming that your goal is to work in a support role(administration, networking etc). Being a phone monkey probably won't help you become a developer, or a project manager or that sort of thing because it's not in the same chain.
This article was excellent. I started a job right out of college as a support engineer. While the job did not sound like it was exactly what I wanted coming out of school, I took it anyway. I have to say that the article is dead on with the skills you acquire as a support engineer. While only supporting one particular line of products, you have the ability to learn more technologies than you ever dreamed up in order to fully understand a clients situation. For example, I have learned a great deal about every database vendor there is (as our products support most of them). Where else are you going to get exposure to all of that? If you're just working with one application in an organization that has chose to implement Oracle, all you're going to know is Oracle. I have been in my current role for 2 years. While I have been promoted to a team-lead role, I still recognize that I do need to get out, as it is very easy to get comfortable in a high paying support role. While many do not aspire to take new challenges, it is something that has to be done. The longer you stay in support, the less chances you have to "get out". I have seen people that have been in support roles for 30+ years, and I have seen people that have gone from support engineers, right to senior level management as a result of their knowledge and experience acquired in their support role. While the typical aspiration for a support engineer is to join their products development team as a developer, there are many other paths that can be taken (ie - technical sales lead, technical field rep, management, training personnel, business analyst, solutions architect, etc...). The vice president of our organization started out as a support engineer. Support is all about what you put in to it, and what you take from it. Learn from everything you do, challenge yourself even if your role is not challenging, and question everything you're not sure of! I completely agree that support is a great launchpad for success in the IT industry and would encourage those in support to take this article as gospel, as it is right on! If you decide to interview for a new job, and they're not impressed that you were in a support role, get up and walk out. They'll be out of business faster than you can get another job.
I started out at 18 on an assembly line. At 19 I was doing an advanced assembly line. At 20 I was doing a badassed field engineer/installer job that had me traveling the country on salary just above minimum wage, but damn it was a cool job with a bit of prestige.
At 20/21 I moved to a company that paid a little better, but I was a mobile systems administrator/general tech of anything they needed done. It was a tackle anything position and really job function wise what most techs shoot for.
We partnered up with one of our bigger clients and formed an ISP. We allowed our old company to become adsorbed into the ISP. Turns out I was incredibly talented at running help desk, training new people who where just out of (or occasionally still in) high school.
Word of my talent at getting just about anything to communicate on the web spread through my coworkers outside of the company. One of them left for a much better paying job and lured me over, the fact the ISP was screwing everyone they had contact with I went without much hesitation.
The new place was an oil company. I had a remote support position. I don't want to call it a help desk, the help desk was the group below. Yes we were remote support over the phone, but we dispatched techs, ordered parts, and did real honest to God troubleshooting. We didn't read books on how to do it, we wrote them. We coordinated the satellite people, the pump people, the telco people, Lexmark etc, when something actually broke in our area, we went in person, though it wasn't in the job description. It was an advanced position.
Well, the gas company ditched all corporate store and made all stores private. My position went away. I was able to work with the desktop team for a while, but they were streamlining most of that out of existence as well. When I went to find another job I was horrified.
I HAD BEEN PIGEON HOLED.
Turns out managing a help desk puts you on a help desk. Turns out remotely working with Hughes Satellite systems remotely (really how else do you work with a communication company?) along with supporting stores stung all across the country classifies you as "help desk" to employers, no matter how advanced it was and the fact the help desk was a different entity. I spent two and half years bouncing between help desk jobs which I hated and purposefully seizing lesser paying installer positions and anything I could do in the field to remove the help desk brand from my forehead.
I now maintain serial communications equipment for NASA. I help the other groups as well, we have a lot of Unix and Linux stations that they need a hand with, and I occasionally work with DVIS (Digital Voice Intercommunications System) and the video equipment, along with any other random thing that needs to be done at the Johnson Space Centers Mission Control Center.
It's really not the most brain wrenching job, but working with satellite communications on the "help desk" helped to get my foot in the door, along with the fact I had already had a habit of working with ancient equipment.
I flat told my current employer during my interview I had been branded and pigeon holed as help desk and I needed out badly, and I described why he should hire/help me. Fortunately my current company has real technical and management people making choices NOT HR DRONES. They hired me, and not only is it not help desk, the job is fun and one of the few places I've ever worked where I get treated like a real human instead of livestock. Sure there's a sense of being livestock on some level, anytime you work with the government that's going to happen, but overall they treat us very well.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
In two weeks, I transfer to the NOC, after 6 months in the HD. Admittedly, I'm getting a bit old for the HD anyway (26).
"Help desks that push call times and scripts over fixing stuff the right way are a Dead End and good tech people will fail at it and it can lead to you losing good techs."
That's called Tech Support, that's not a Help Desk position, I started where i work now as a Help Desk Rep, prior to this my last tech job was working at Teleperformance for 3 months as a tech support agent...people who are at a tech support job for more than 3 months are in a dead end because no one took that as serious IT experience. I was hired Help Desk here, I'm now lead developer on 2 projects in under 6 months.
Tech Support has no opinion here, Tech Support is a revolving door...the only reason they don't use them is because that would be too obvious...
I find very few help desks any more. Most have been turned into service or call routing desks. Heck, my work "help desk" even changed its name to a service desk. Of course the lack of english and basic comprehention has drove people to submit all requests via email/web.
I suppose it all depend on what job and what job/qualifications we are taking about. The post I responded to talked about LEVEL 1 telephone grunts (the kind of job that reads questions from a script and jots down the answer), so I scanned ads on seek.com.au for LEVEL 1 help desk jobs, not level 2, level 3, or sysadmins.
My own life story is a bit longer than yours...
Although I dropped out of high school in what is now called year 11, I am degree qualified BSc, majors in CS and OR, and 20yrs experience as a developer under my belt. I have worked for the 'big three' and also some 3 man outfits, before that I spent 15yrs in shit jobs outside the IT industry. I say 'shit jobs' because some of those jobs literally involved shit.
My first IT job fresh out of uni was a code monkey position at ~$27K, within 5yrs I was up to $70K as a developer, 10yrs ago I was pulling ~$140K as a lead developer on a $600M 5yr project and had to incorporate myself to reduce the tax bill, today ~$90K as a developer but 35hrs/wk rather than the 60hrs/wk as a lead. I've been told by my current boss: "If you want more money you have to get a promotion, to get a promotion you have to work more hours", my reply was "I've seen your job and been there myself, not interested thank-you very much".
I don't begrudge the 15yrs of shit jobs. Sure, it was hard work with long hours, and debt collectors were a part of life but some of the jobs such as fishing in the mountainous seas of Bass Straight and working at an old growth sawmill in the middle of a temprate rainforest which is now (thankfully) a national park were experiences that I wouldn't trade for all the tea in China.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I worked the graveyard shift with one other person then eventually by myself. Not many calls in the middle of the night unless it was from one of the overseas plants so it was a good time to read through help files and past case calls to see what resolved it. We were given pretty good leeway to try and solve issues and our 'leads' would add solutions to the help files regularly.
After 9 months I felt I had learned all I could there and took a lower paying job elsewhere as a PC/LAN techinician doing hands on support. That lead to becoming the director of network admin when my boss retired, which led to my current position with a federal agency. So in my case, yes it was a launch pad, had I gotten comfy I would have been laid off eventually because Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide and kept their helpdesk elsewhere and shut down the Carbide one. And pay was decent for helpdesk, $20 per hour in 1998 was good scratch after earning E5 military pay, especially with overtime a regular happening, just didn't have any bennies from the contract agency.
If you must keep groaning, please try to do it in a rhythm I can dance to
I currently work tech support for a cell phone company and am hoping to move up in the tech field, so this article is particularly interesting to me. My springboard may be the extensive intranet resources I've created to help the rest of our call-center people understand technical issues.
As far as talking about the "idiot customers" - I've noticed that the regular account reps who pass tech calls on to me often say "this person is an idiot." Curiously, when I talk to them, they often turn out to be very intelligent people who just aren't familiar with their BlackBerry or whatever, and haven't had things explained to them properly. (I might also argue that the device isn't well-designed if it's function isn't more intuitive...)
Of course, there are users who are very non-tech-savvy, but hey, I might not understand their jobs, either. Perspective makes a big difference in the help desk.
IMHO, if you focus on helping other people with stuff you already know, and that's your whole job, you're not learning anything new and becoming stagnant, so yes. On the other hand, if you move around enough to expose yourself to different technologies and whatnot, you will be continually improving. Many argue that the best way to learn something is to teach another.
Companies that (a) have their crap together, and (b) operate their own help desks are an excellent place to get your foot in the door. Companies like that are expecting to hire people to the help desk and promote the best of them out of the role in about six months. If you're good, you'll be getting out of that desk before you've even left a dent in the chair.
Something to keep in mind: The more distinct and real levels of technical staff, the easier it is to move up the chain for a bright and motivated person.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I also left my previous employer for similar reasons. In my case, I applied for 36 positions internally, 7 of which came to the interview stage, but I was always the "runner up." It was also the only time I was ever "stood up" by one of the interviewers, who ironically would later become my boss for a few months. My last raise was maxed at 6% and I also gained just over 15% by going to another company. We must have been separated at birth or something. Eerie.
:) :)
I'd like to add to your note to HR departments:
Don't "upgrade" your internal job posting database without thoroughly testing it out. Nothing is worse than having to actually post for internal jobs via freaking MONSTER.COM. Oh well, at least I was still being paid to hunt for my next job.
Back in the day (I'm guessing over a decade), Hewlett-Packard used to require all their engineers to spend two weeks out of every year answering phones for the support desk. I remember the service as some of the best I've every gotten in the industry. The philosophy behind the decision was forcing the engineers to work directly with the clients made the engineers better. I sure do miss the old HP!
I am an IT recruiter for a large recruiting firm. When i see people who have been in more than 1 helpdesk position, or really any helpdesk position, i do not ever consider them for anything other than helpdesk and neither do my colleagues.
Parent and article are both just so, SO true.
Like any job that's the bottom of a ladder, helpdesk certainly is a place filled with plenty of deadbeats, if you're the sort of person that's likely to end up in a nowhere job forever, you're just as likely to do it there as anywhere else.
If you're not and likely to fight to move on, again, like any job that has a ladder above it, it's something with somewhere to make a move, I'd say better than most.
I, and most of the other higher-end IT people I know, started in the exact scenario, slaving as 1st-level support while I was doing a CS degree.
From 1st level if you know what you're doing and work hard enough, it's generally trivial to get to 2nd/3rd/whatever-they-define level, anyone who stays in 1st is in it for the dead-end.
Once you're out of that, the sky's the limit, just push for training and new experiences wherever you are, and be ready to jump ship if an opportunity further up the food chain arises.
I did so, and before graduating I'd moved 1st->2nd-level support at one place -> sysadmin at another -> "IT Manager" for a very small Japanese company (Side-note: languages ALWAYS help) -> back to the old company as lead sysadmin/IT-guy with massive payrise -> "Real IT Manager" for a much larger business -> similar elsewhere -> made enough to escape and launch a new (Now moderately successful) business as CTO.
Sure, a LOT of jumping around and chasing leads (8-9 job changes, 3 houses, 3 countries even, in 4 years...) but it also brought at least 10x the salary, invaluable knowledge and experience, and memories I'll never forget.
Any job offers opportunities above it, known in Ye Olde Days as a "career", which you can aim for, if you work hard enough you'll get them. Think of it how you will, but the only real variation is the number of 'levels' available.
IT ranges from stoner 1st-level support forever 'perms' up to Page, Brin, Gates, et al.
What could be a better opportunity?
This is precisely why I think all recruiters are scum and refuse to waste any time with them. That's also why I won't give Fortune 500s the time of day anymore either, since they're the ones who typically use them. I have since moved on to smaller and better companies that actually appreciate my skills despite my unlucky history of layoffs, mergers, and outsourcing every other year on average in this awful local market.
Thank you for reiterating what I already know. Recruiters indeed only care about the bottom line and do not care to take a chance with hidden talent out there. They're simply too blind to even consider why some people are stuck in the situations they're in. That's why you and I thankfully will never cross paths, and your clients will never get a chance to see value in people like myself. Their loss; your loss; my gain.
2. Find a company with college tuition benefits and who will pay for certifications.
3. Get some certifications towards the area you want to work in.
4. Let them pay for your college and educate yourself into a better job! 5. ???
6. Profit!
Fixed that for ya. ^_^