Life after Tech Support...

[Bo Jackson]

Yes, I am an ATOT noob. Now that we have that out of the way, I have a question. How many of you have worked in Tech Support and used that work experience to get a better IT job? I graduated a year ago with a BS in Computer Science, and got a good paying, Tech Support job about a month out of college. I have been working in this position for about a year and working on a few networking certifications (Cisco) on the side. Hopefully, I will be able to apply for a better paying job some time later this year. So has anyone successfully made it out of Tech Support?

 

[ViviTheMage]

By tech support, you mean help desk/phone support?


BTW welcome

 

[sourceninja]

I started doing internet tech support for a small company. Eventually that lead me to assisting a systems admin. That eventually ended up with me becoming a system admin for a smaller company. Their programmer needed help, so I got to fill in for him on smaller issues and slowly learned the ropes of proper programming (which was much different then what I learned in high school).

A few jobs later (including working for some very large medical software firms) and I am in charge of operations at a mid-sized college. I'm responsible for planning the direction of the IT department, server security, backups, I manage all the unix/linux systems, and I also write a LOT of php and java software to support our main business application.

I'm not college educated (Working on fixing that) and I don't really expect that in todays climate anyone could work their way up the way I did. Especially if you do not have access to small businesses. The key to my initial success was it being the 90's and having access to companies with 2-5 man IT departments. This allowed me to build real world experience as well as have time and resources to play and develop the depth of field I needed for that 'next level' job. This also had the stress of being constantly over my head and spending most of my private time learning the things I needed to know to not get fired.

It payed off. Today I manage about 70 servers, a majority of them on our ESX cluster that I also manage. I'm able to recommend the direction the college should travel in regards to IT and they are willing to back me with the money I need to properly implement things. Even there however with my background stretching back to the mid-90's I had to earn my trust because of a lack of a college degree. It took years of proving myself by stepping up when everything was down to bring solid resolutions. Eventually they gave me the weak link projects in the college (backups for example). Professionalizing these often ignored area's earned that trust and as people left, I was given the chance to fill their shoes.

So it is possible. Having that degree is a good start. I wish I had one.

 

[whitedragon2203]

Go work on your certifications, that will get you an interview. Get whatever real world sys/net admin/engineer experience you can gather. However, I really emphasize the fact that you need to try to get into IT Project Management. Get your PM Certification, learn all of the equations, know FIT/GRIP like the back of your hand. You will have a very good earning potential, a much less stressful life and will thank me later.

 

[Bo Jackson]

ViviTheMage:

I work on a Help Desk. But I do a lot more than Phone Support. I work for the State and Federal Government. I work on the computer systems for Medicaid. Basically support the Medicaid employees and servicing the Medicaid offices in the state I work for. The cool thing about the job is it really puts me in some challenging scenarios, not just solving minor Windows problems. This is where I have gotten a real interest in Networking, and started to pursue a CCIE route, but I would ultimately like to end up as an IT consultant of some sort.

sourceninja:

Thanks. Your story gives me some hope.

 

[ultimatebob]

Go work on your certifications, that will get you an interview. Get whatever real world sys/net admin/engineer experience you can gather. However, I really emphasize the fact that you need to try to get into IT Project Management. Get your PM Certification, learn all of the equations, know FIT/GRIP like the back of your hand. You will have a very good earning potential, a much less stressful life and will thank me later.

OK, I'll bite... what in the hell are FIT and GRIP? I've heard of the PMI certification process, but I've never heard of those acronyms.

My advice would be to get certified in VMWare... there are a bunch of high paying admin jobs out there that need virtualization skills.

 

[whitedragon2203]

My background is a little bit different from most people...

Enlisted in the US Army - CyberSecurity MRF129 - I was a Network Engineer for the majority of my enlisted life.

Went to college at North Dakota State University, there is where I recieved my first civillian IT Job, as network support for their infrastructure. Not so much over the phone as once again I am doing mostly network here, however, working a lot of odd hours/on call.

Graduated from North Dakota State University, became a System Administrator for a local hospital. After that worked for a large VAR/Consulting agency, travelling nation wide for whatever client. Became a certified trainer for VMWare, Citrix, and even Microsoft. Still working for the same VAR, worked as a trainer for a little over a year.

Went back to becoming a field consultant, (Still same VAR) while working on my PM Certification. Recieved PM Certification, and took perm offer w/ Target Corporation as a PM based out of Minneapolis, MN.

The reason why I tell you this is because of this, I love IT, I love computers, do not get me wrong. But I don't feel like re learning, re training, and doing everything over and over again for the rest of my career/life. Project Management has stayed relatively the same for many years, there are new process, new ways to get things done, but the maintenance on this skill set is much lower then that of your admin/engineer.

I lived the glory days of being the consultant, it's great. However even comparing to an expert "niche market" consultant, your average PM is going to make far more money.

Moral of the story: Become a PM.

 

[whitedragon2203]

OK, I'll bite... what in the hell are FIT and GRIP? I've heard of the PMI certification process, but I've never heard of those acronyms.

My advice would be to get certified in VMWare... there are a bunch of high paying admin jobs out there that need virtualization skills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_life_cycle

They call it "GAP" here, however it's all the same.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I started off at help desk myself when I graduated, and now I'm a l3 server tech. Worked help desk for about 2 years and I'm almost on my 1st year as server tech now. If you prove yourself you can move fast enough given the position you want comes available.

 

[Bo Jackson]

whitedragon2203:
Isn't one of the problems with the PM certs that you have to have Project Management experience to take the test, and in order to get a Project Management job to get that experience, you have to have prior PM experience? Seems like a catch 22.


ultimatebob:
Good idea. I probably could get a VM cert on the side. We use a ton of VM software here.

 

[sourceninja]

I'm actually getting sent to get my VM cert sometime soon. I can't for the life of me figure out how they will fill that class time. ESX is stupid easy to use and learn.

 

[Patt]

I've got to say ... it really depends upon the type of Tech Support you're doing. If you go by my title, I'm a Technical Support Representative, however, I work for a very progressive smallish company, and I support the software we write. We write development software, so the type of Tech Support I do concerns our products, but more often I'm helping troubleshoot logic issues, and helping out with more advanced programming concepts.

In between technical support calls, I can delve as deeply into the code as I wish, and can help with development, internal projects as well as technical sales.

Don't bash 'Tech Support' before you know the type that is being done.

 

[whitedragon2203]

whitedragon2203:
Isn't one of the problems with the PM certs that you have to have Project Management experience to take the test, and in order to get a Project Management job to get that experience, you have to have prior PM experience? Seems like a catch 22.


ultimatebob:
Good idea. I probably could get a VM cert on the side. We use a ton of VM software here.

http://certification.about.com/od/projectmanagement/p/pmp.htm

4500 hours to be exact in 5 of the process groups. Which you can easily achieve in infrastructure. Even as an Administrator, Engineer, or Technical Architect during upgrades, migrations, and "Some" Break/Fix hours can qualify during your 4500.

 

[whitedragon2203]

I'm actually getting sent to get my VM cert sometime soon. I can't for the life of me figure out how they will fill that class time. ESX is stupid easy to use and learn.

Go get your VCP 4.0 then, shouldn't be hard...should it?

ESX as a baremetal hypervisor, is very simple. Not many companies really care about you being able to navigate around a single ESX Box. What they do care about is, are you able to manage Virtual Center? Do you know virtual networking inside and out? What about cloud, does your company want to implement that, if so, do you know the steps to get there?

There is a lot you can learn in the VMware side, as stated before I use to be a trainer on there products.

 

[sourceninja]

Go get your VCP 4.0 then, shouldn't be hard...should it?

ESX as a baremetal hypervisor, is very simple. Not many companies really care about you being able to navigate around a single ESX Box. What they do care about is, are you able to manage Virtual Center? Do you know virtual networking inside and out? What about cloud, does your company want to implement that, if so, do you know the steps to get there?

There is a lot you can learn in the VMware side, as stated before I use to be a trainer on there products.

I run a good sized cluster, hooked to multiple vlans at multiple locations and about 20TB of storage. We have FT, HA, DRS, etc all implemented. It is a fairly complex setup, it will be even more complex this summer when we add about 200 virtual desktops (via xendeskop and xenapp).

I setup the pilot by hand. It was small (3 servers + 1 vcenter with 10TB of storage, just vmotion, no FT, DRS, etc). We used it for about 2 years and it was flawless. When we went with our full scale deployment we payed for consultants who were vmware certified to come in and set us up. I was shoulder surfing the entire time and really they did not make any decisions or do anything differently then I would have done it. We only hired them because I was sure it had to be harder then I thought it was. I am now of the opinion that I was mistaken. We also run LabManager for internal testing.

As for a public cloud, we have no near term plans for it. The big shots are far too worried about the implications of student information leaving our campuses. Private cloud computing is always a possibility. Actually, because of the fact we run almost all linux servers (the remaining solaris will be replaced with linux very soon) we are actually looking at Eucalyptus (http://www.eucalyptus.com/) and re-evaluating vmware (mostly because of the fact they do not offer a quality linux/mac vcenter client) and relegating vmware to just providing the linked clones for the virtual desktops.

The number of times we have called tech support for vmware in 5 years has been 0. Our staff is smart enough and large enough to handle most anything we want to in-house. Of course we will also consider XenServer and probably run a long term proof of concept.

I'm not saying it's so easy an cave man can do it. But it is very easy compared to most of the other job tasks I've been given in my lifetime. I'd rather manage a vmware cluster then a few sun servers with zones/ and banner/luminus. But yea, my boss is sending me off to get the Cert very soon. Probably over the summer once our yearly budget is approved. It's on the list to get vmware, solaris, and java certified by this time next year.

 

[her209]

Bo knows tech support.

:biggrin:

 

[gaidensensei]

Isn't the most closely related branching jobs to tech support are Systems/Network/etc Admin?

I went on the same path, after college I went straight into IT Technician/ and a support Systems Admin.

It was great, but after 2.5 years, like whitedragon said I could not imagine myself doing this for 30+ more years. I quit my job.

Bo, you might want to think ahead if this is the route you are firm that you will stay on as you get older.

 

[Fingolfin269]

I don't know anything about help desk other than when I call in... however, I do know that your avatar pic freaking rocks.