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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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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.
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.
- 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.
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 did help desk for an ISP. I was never one of the youngest people there and by the time my job was outsourced, I was senior to most of the people in the company. I was still doing help desk, at top level, because I'd come to realize that I actually liked doing it. The trouble-shooting was a constant challenge because no matter how fool-proof you make your software, nature keeps coming up with fools who can manage to mess things up, and with the constantly-changing OS issues of Windows, there was always more to learn. For me, at least, it was a very satisfying job because every day I could go home knowing that there were at least twenty or so people who's days were a little better because I'd helped them. Not everybody can think that way, but if you can, the help desk doesn't have to become the hell desk.
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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.
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.
HDI certifications are a joke.
Here let me fix that for you
HDI certifications are a cruel, joke.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Yyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssss
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
I like many did my few years of phone support and helpdesk before moving on to sysadmin work, but I knew many people on the helpdesk and in tech support who were perfectly content with their lives and had no desire to do anything else. I even knew one co-worker who moved out into sysadmin work, decided he didn't like it, and went back to the helpdesk.
There's nothing wrong with being content in your job and not having a desire to climb the corporate ladder. In the case of Helpdesk work you may one day have to move on to something entirely different when all the helpdesk jobs are on another continent, but that's no different than a factory or steel worker doing a career change for similar reasons. Just accept this and be ready to find something new if the time comes.
I hear you. I started out as a telemarketer- inbound, working at a huge call center in Omaha. After many customer service jobs and a few years at an automobile insurance claims handling call center, I wound up with a help desk job. Great experience, it really fleshes out your troubleshooting skills. I tend to work a job for a while to learn the ropes, then move up or over. I jumped between desktop support and help desk positions and contracts for a little while, and 6 months ago I got a Sys Admin job for a local branch of a large company. I love it. I'm not on the phones, I have control over what priorities are set on problems, my own office, the boss is not onsite and I only talk to her once a week, I am a corporate employee and have no one to answer to at the branch office. It's great. I think that working the help desk got me here. I don't intend to stay here more than a few years, again, moving up or over, but I really appreciate the time I spent working the help desk. So I'd have to say its a launchpad, just not usually within the same company.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.