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Welcome to the Help Desk!The help desk is without a doubt the best place to cut your teeth in the world of IT. It can only get better from there!  Training - Non-Technical - What will really give you an edge over your competition Certification - Technical - Choosing the right qualifications and avoiding the wrong ones is critical!
For most an IT career begins at the service desk. Not to be confused with a call center – life on the help desk typically involves going out to visit users at their desks as well as taking calls over the phone, checking for tickets logged on the database and quite often dealing with users just turning up in person (they’re not supposed to do that!). Call centers - although similar in some ways are entirely different animals. The main difference being that they typically cater for members of the public and large volumes of corporate clients whereas help desks are internal to a business and cater for users in the same building and remote offices. This work is very hands on. Expect to do a lot of password resets, clear a lot of paper jams, see a lot of hardware/software faults and much more. Welcome to the front lineThe main function of a service desk is to be the first port of call for anyone with IT problems. Some organisations vary with the amount of hands on work the service desk operators actually get to do. In some places I’ve worked in the they only take the calls and assign them to the relevant teams. In other places the help desk has been a 1 stop shop for all things IT/network/phone related with the IT manager mucking in taking calls as well as fixing servers, ordering equipment and planning future IT strategies. However large or small an organisation one thing is constant throughout all help desks – if someone has a problem, you’ll get to hear about it first! Extreme multitaskingWorking on a service desk is a busy job – to put it mildly. Taking the calls and assigning them to people is one thing but you also have to feed back to the users what the status and progress of their tickets are. The sheer volume of work can be quite overwhelming at times and it’s easy to forget about things if you don’t keep track of what’s what and prioritise accordingly. Training can prepare you for this aspect of the job, organisation and time management skills will be your best friends. This is when call logging software comes in very handy. Becoming adept in the ins and outs of such software is essential, as is checking it regularly and keeping an eye on the urgent stuff and staying on top of timelines you’ve given people. Users love to blame the IT department for things so don’t give them any ammunition! Working on a help desk is the best place to start your IT career. You’ll get a real education into how IT departments work and learn a lot from those further up the chain. For more detail on how to get into a help desk role check the links below. Return from Help Desk Work back to Home Page
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