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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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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.
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.
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 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.