Lessons learned from my first IT Job

Over the course of the past few months, I have been working at my first IT Help Desk position at a Fortune 500 Aerospace Company. My time at this company has only been a few months, but despite that, I wanted to note down some things that I have learned during my time at this company.

The first lesson that I learned during my time at the help desk is to ask probing questions. For this lesson, I will start with an example. When I first began to take calls, I was making a lot of mistakes, and I found that my biggest weakness was not asking the proper amount of questions to the customer. When you do not ask questions, that is when you turn tickets into much longer than they should be. I had a customer call in regarding needing a password reset. I had already been taking many calls regarding password resets, and I felt that it would be the same process as it always has been. So I started to go through the process, and once I provided the teammate with the new password that needs to be reset, that is when the customer tells me, quite frustrated, that the new password is not working. What happened here is that I did not ask enough probing questions! The teammate needed a password reset to her HR account and not her Windows account. If I had asked questions such as "are you at the Windows login screen," then that could have helped me to narrow the scope and have taken unneeded changes.

The second lesson that I learned is not being afraid to ask for help. Depending on your help desk environment, there is a good chance that you are going to have hundreds of different knowledge base articles. The sheer amount of articles was very intimidating for me when I first started. In addition, I would often want to try to solve the problems myself, but what I realized quite soon into working is that it is okay to ask for help. You should be using whatever resources that you have in order to be successful. In my case, we had chat watchers who were tier 2 agents, and we could ask any question to them. Do not suffer alone! Ask for help, and oftentimes people will be more than willing to help you, which in turn lets you help your customers.

The third lesson that I learned is customer service can outweigh technical skills in a help desk environment. Help Desk is inherently a customer service job, and while I learned that I can solve problems fairly fast, what I learned that is even more important is customer service. When working in a help desk role, you will likely have metrics that you need to achieve. In my case, we had something called CSAT (customer surveys). When I prioritized customer service, that is when I found that I would get good surveys, which helps me to stay employed.

I am only five months into my first role as a Help Desk analyst. Since the environment that I am in is a bit of a call center at times, I can feel it being very hectic. However, I am so happy to be in a technical role after searching for quite a long time. Maybe in a year or two, I will write a new blog post regarding this topic and share with you all on what else I have learned since being here.

Article originally published on my personal blog, rootaccess.blog