Are you a fresh college graduate trying to enter the job market with starry dreams of making it really big, maybe the CIO of a blue chip company like Nike before you turn 30. Again it is quite possible you happen to be a college dropout who happens to love programming and the fact that you are indeed a hard worker who goes on to fill the individual spare time by writing code and blogging.
Early Stage
Well if any of these describe you, a great opportunity awaits you, that of becoming a desktop support technician for an organization. It is in fact, an early stage job opening that affords ample opportunities for career growth within the same organization or a similar company.
Phone Based Assistance
It is important to bear in mind the fact, that some organizations use the job title desktop support technician, whereas others use the job title of a help desk technician, the latter is a phone-based assistance, whereas people working as desktop support technicians are quite likely to go to a customer’s premises, in order to render assistance on computer related issues.
Close Knit
Great communication and interpersonal skills are required, besides being patient, and adopting a consumer-friendly attitude, add to this the ability to work in a close-knit team environment. In addition to these, a reasonably strong technical understanding of various facets of the software as well as hardware systems that require support is a must.
Equip Yourself
You would do well to equip yourself with professional certification, or a bachelor’s degree in an information technology-related field. Depending on where you stand in the support hierarchy for desktop, you would encounter different things on different workdays.
Escalation
You may begin with creating tickets initially, handle various enquiries, and troubleshoot, hardware and software applications besides rectifying network problems. More difficult issues would automatically get escalated to more experienced team members.
Preventive Solutions
With training and added experience you would be able to handle the most difficult of issues, which others were unable to resolve. You would be able to analyze various trends in the reporting of issues while coming up with preventive solutions. It goes without saying by this time you would also be mentoring junior technicians.
Play Around
Do bear this important fact in mind, that the field is evolving constantly and you would relentlessly need to keep up with the ongoing changes in the industry and constantly keep on updating your skills in order to remain relevant. Be a tech generalist and pick up additional tech skills on your own, make it a point to play around with various new languages and programs.
Final Thoughts
Most of the so-called present day best jobs certainly look forward to really sky-high qualifications to just let you inside the door which is the first major hurdle or an insurmountable one at that to be able to break-in into the IT field, that too into a well-paying tech industry job without possessing an advanced degree, do consider starting as a desktop support technician, and in all likelihood you are going to end up in management role after requisite expertise and experience.
