IT Careers advice please

[Spiderman]

I'll be at soho for sure mate probably not much before 7.30ish tho.

Fizz...if i know nothing about the product in depth then i guess i get no-where right? I know in sales its sometimes the more product knowledge you have the easier you sell the product. But its back to that old chestnut of how do i get the product knowledge without being in the firm that sells the product.

None of what you guys ae saying is putting me off btw, i knw o generalised about the IT helpdesk satt that i've called being rubbish in the past but this really always has been first line support for Dell or Compaq or someone tbh. I've found that when i get to the next line of support they are far easier to deal with and far more willing to listen to what you have to say as opposed to tell you " i know you probably did this already but can you go to control panel...etc etc.

I like the idea of going to peoples companies and actullay installing things from the comps to the wiring to the software etc. I dont think i'd enjoy sitting and taking calls for 8-10hrs a day in an office...but if thats what it takes to get in them i'm also the kind of guy to throw myself into things with gusto and be the best i can be.

I'll see what I can do about getting there myself then

[fizzwheel]

Originally Posted by Spiderman

Fizz...if i know nothing about the product in depth then i guess i get no-where right?

Yep, in fact I embarressed a guy doing pre sales once as I knew more about his product than he did, needless to say his company didnt get our business...

For what I do, if your doing pre sales you need to be sh*te hot with it. The last big pre sales job we did, involved ripping out our phone system for a 350 seat call centre and a Thousand seat head office and installing a new one. You cant faff about with that kinda of stuff if you dont know what you're doing.

Originally Posted by Spiderman

I like the idea of going to peoples companies and actullay installing things from the comps to the wiring to the software etc.

I used to do just that. I enjoyed it, but I didnt like the amount of driving I had to do as some days I spent more time on the road / driving than I did with my customers. Also we had a bad salesman who would tell the customer any old cr*p to get the order and then it was my job to try and make what he had sold them do what they wanted. I quite often got sworn at and verbally abused by frustrated end users who had spent alot of money and not got what they wanted. Remember earlier when I said about IT being about people skills and not just techie knowledge...

I got fedup with it in the end and left, I like working in a big company where my user base are not customers who have paid money, its much less stressful. As I can walk away from sh*te or I can simply defer them off to my manager who then deals with cr*p that I'm not paid to take...

Mind you nothing motivates more than having a red faced angry person shouting at you because their system doesnt work and threating to sue the ass off your company and then turning it around and making them a happy customer. I did used to get a buzz out of that.

Originally Posted by Spiderman

I dont think i'd enjoy sitting and taking calls for 8-10hrs a day in an office...but if thats what it takes to get in them i'm also the kind of guy to throw myself into things with gusto and be the best i can be.

It depends where you work, you might spend time on the phone and then the next day you'll be out and about doing the face to face stuff. If I'm looking at CV's I do look for people who have real world experience rather than paper quali's. If I can see they've done helpdesk time and then worked their way up through the hieracy into whatever current role they've got into I tend to pick those people over anybody else.

Your trouble is going to be getting in and getting the experience especially at the moment with so many techies being out of work. The advice given earlier about getting into a small company and finding out what you do or dont like doing is a great one, Thats the sort of place I started at when I left college...

Originally Posted by Spiderman

I dont think i'd enjoy sitting and taking calls for 8-10hrs a day in an office...but if thats what it takes to get in them i'm also the kind of guy to throw myself into things with gusto and be the best i can be.

Maybe 10% of my work is taking calls, and even then, at least 80% of that is talking to our field engineers, not customers. I can sit in the office all day, sometimes the phone won't ring once!
That's due to the fact i do application support, not desktop. Most of my work is done trying to work out whats gone wrong, why, and how to stop it happening again.
Sometimes that comes with a sharp learning curve, in a previous job they told me that they didn't expect me to start being productive for 6months! But in this job, if you can play roulette, you're good.
Kev, i'll drop you a pm in a bit to avoid further derail.

Forget courses advertised on the telly, I wouldn't employ anybody on the strength of one of those. Someone said MCSE is useless, I disagree, there is a lot of guys with MCSE's so no it doesn't gain you a huge advantage, but if you don't have one, it then leaves you as the only guy who doesn't ie: at a disadvantage. Employers do look for them as certifications are the only way you can tell that the skills listed on the CV have been tested and are not just BS. Don't do it now though, get an IT job first. Fizz is right that nowadays it's best to back it up with a VMware VCP when you get the opportunity. Cisco certifications, etc, take you down a different more specialised career path and you can always do them later on once you've found out and decided what floats your boat, or you may decide not to progress technically at all and instead go into operational/service delivery management, or service management consultancy or and go for ITIL certification (more about IT process and procedure than technical).

The usual technical career path is:

1st line Helpdesk -> Remote 2nd Line Support -> 2nd Line Support -> 3rd Line and Technical Consultancy then your usually either into Pre-Sales or IT Service/Operational Management depending on best fit for your personality and skills.

1st line means at first point of contact with the customer, the guy who talks to you on the phone and can do basic stuff like reset your password or fix common problems, remote 2nd line is the guy who connects to your computer moves the mouse around and fixes stuff, 2nd line the guy who turns up at your desk, 3rd line if it's more specialist networks, business applications or a problem 2nd line can't figure out.

I'm a Pre-Sales Technical Architect. I did Business Information Technology at Uni then went straight into 2nd Line Support, then 3rd Line, then Service Management Consultancy so less technical, then back to Technical Consultancy (Project implementation & pre-sales 50% of each), and now I'm dedicated Pre-Sales designing and selling hosted data centre infrastructure solutions, I'm on a base salary then a targeted bonus, I report into a board director in a £230 million business and I've been IT full time for about 12 years now.

When I was doing Service Management Consultancy I was setting up IT helpdesks for both 1st line and remote 2nd line, and doing transitions and service improvement. The worst part of this job was having to take the role of the Helpdesk Operations Manager for a few months whilst the helpdesk settled in, but it does mean I know a little bit about this world, even though I never actually had to do much of it myself at the sharp end of the telephone.

Helpdesk analysts get paid **** and you know what they say about paying peanuts - you get monkeys! For this reason anyone with a bit of gumption about them stood out and got noticed and their careers accelerated. 2nd line desks were always short staffed due to technical guys getting stolen for projects, and to back-fill more technical teams, so the guys with the best brains got taken off 1st line and put "temporarily" on 2nd line. A fast steep learning curve, but if you managed it and were well motivated, it would end up becoming a permanent position and it wouldn't be long before you were the one getting stolen from that team for projects and better more interesting things.

So getting a Helpdesk Analysts position is definitely the way into IT if you have no formal IT qualifications such as a degree. Stay motivated positive and eager with a can-do attitude in an environment where everyone else is ****ed off, demotivated and half asleep and within a year you'll have Operations Managers and Consultants saying what a good guy you are and you'll start to move up. From there you will be able to get your employer to fund your training and you'll have a better idea if you want to go into servers/virtualisation and the Microsoft/VMware certification route, or if you want to get into Networks and go down the Cisco route.

Good luck and I know you've got plenty offers already, but you can PM if you want to.

I'm doing a dual 1st/2nd line role, While i'm on a helpdesk most of the time I also do alot of desk visits and remote control of regional offices...

It can be enjoyable sometimes, unfortunately where I am there isn't much opportunity to learn new things as its a small team and people don't like giving up their knowledge as they've all been there for donkeys years and want to protect their little corner

The whole IT dept got outsourced to Atos Origin last december though with a 1 year job garauntee, this runs out in december, i'm looking at other roles internally but suffering as i've not specialised and have basically been doing a bit of everything which doesn't seem to be what people are looking for, certainly within large organisations.

So while i'd recommend starting with a helpdesk role like others have said it's useful to try and specialize or find a niche where you can.

Happy Hunting

Originally Posted by Daimo

Never being one for "playing the office game", and even though my morals and ethics are very high, and my work rate has always been at the top of the charts, i've never got anywhere.

I've found that if you have your own mind, and are prepared to stand up for what you believe is right, you are a troublemaker. No matter how good a worker you are, how much work you go through, how many "so called" friends and work colleague you get on with, theres always some ass kissing tw4t who does bugger all work, yet has their head so far up a managers ass they'll get every promotion under the sun.

Thats exactly how I feel most of the time too, The management have a couple of favourites hence anything interesting comes up guess to gets to work on it, unfortunately the management got outsourced with the rest of us so I didn't get the fresh start I hoped for

Originally Posted by Daimo

Tbh, i seemed to have drifted from company to company, never happy. Never being one for "playing the office game", and even though my morals and ethics are very high, and my work rate has always been at the top of the charts, i've never got anywhere.

I've found that if you have your own mind, and are prepared to stand up for what you believe is right, you are a troublemaker. No matter how good a worker you are, how much work you go through, how many "so called" friends and work colleague you get on with, theres always some ass kissing tw4t who does bugger all work, yet has their head so far up a managers ass they'll get every promotion under the sun.

Originally Posted by Iansv II

Thats exactly how I feel most of the time too, The management have a couple of favourites hence anything interesting comes up guess to gets to work on it, unfortunately the management got outsourced with the rest of us so I didn't get the fresh start I hoped for

Sounds silly but this sort of thing does confuse me, cos I've never had this sort of issue (not to any real degree). While managers will have friends it's never been something that ever had the possibility to impact promotions or pay reviews or work.
So there are companies out there that will base this on merit and not things like who they get on with the best.
I'm not sure quite how to put it but just based on what I have heard (from friends, etc) this kind of attitude is more prevalent in companies where the employees aren't expected to work that...hard, I guess.
I guess with the type of company I'm in (investment bank) you can imagine the culture is very work-oriented, etc. It's completely different to the culture at my previous (defence company) role but even there, I didn't really see any favouritism, etc.

[timwilky]

In a previous company, I did a tour of all our single customer (BT) sites that used our systems. A sort of health check, writing at the coal face little noddy programmes to fix particular data issues they may have etc.

however, on two sites our salesman was with me. He lied through his teeth about what the next release would do and did not take kindly to being told. What I did learn from this exercise was first he was a rubbish salesman. If our next release went in on his promises then we would not get any more orders. What he should have been doing and was failing to do was to feed back to the developers what the customer actually wanted, instead of leaving us to second guess what the next features should be.

Originally Posted by fizzwheel

Your trouble is going to be getting in and getting the experience especially at the moment with so many techies being out of work. The advice given earlier about getting into a small company and finding out what you do or dont like doing is a great one, Thats the sort of place I started at when I left college...

Ironically EVERY person i've ever spoken to in IT who's a manager or something, got into their job at a smaller company, hands on everything, learned everything, became IT manager for years, then moved on.

I went the wrong way round, big companies, good money... Doh