I would like to know what it's like to work in IT, particularly as a help desk level 1. I'm asking this specific question because I would like to get into IT and would like some insight on whether or not I should get into it. I live in Canada so bonus points for people who can tell me what the market is like.
Cheers.
Help desk jobs are f**ked don't do it to yourself. You'll be spending all day talking to stupid people and depending on the company and their policies you likely won't even be able to do your job effectively. No matter how many calls you take you'll constantly be told to do more. Help desk jobs have an incredibly high turnover rate for employees most people don't last more than a year or two because the job is so f**ked I really can't put it anyother way it's fuuuuucked.
IT help desk jobs are fine depending on the the company that you're in. You'll pick up a lot of useful all round general IT skills and will learn how to be a better communicator. You'll have to communicate with internal and external customers so it could be fun if you like talking to people.
You'll be kept busy and will be expected to respond to issues promptly. Good thing about it is that if you can't solve an issue, pass the ticket on to another team (the 2nd line) to deal with it.
It's a good way to get your foot in the door in IT. There are good career paths for most IT jobs.
I agree with both pskov and Lunchtime - both of their answers reflect my experience in that role. I would say it's a braindead job and the only level of technical qualification required for 1st line is if you are the child of a parent, who you fix the internet for them when you get home from college for the summer. lol. 90% of my 3 years involved 2 things: password resets and microsoft outlook problems.
Things might have changed but the company I worked for had no cloud stuff at all; and phone-salesmen who send 1000s emails had to archive their 2GB inboxes. For the first 2 years I just archived them to the hard drive; and then I was told there was a network drive specifically for archives. So me and the other 2 guys spent 2 months moving everyones archives to the drives lol whenever we had an archive issue. I also spent 2 months manually installing antivirus to every PC in a remote office, because the 3rd line guys set up the network that they couldn't roll the software out via a security update. That place was so f**king f**ked.
Tons of simple but repetitive work; and sometimes once or twice a week you'll get some really angry person who needed help yesterday but waited until now to call for help. If you're the kinda person who don't give a shit about other peoples attitude, and can just focus on a technical solution to the technical problem while ignoring all their attitude - this will be invaluable priceless boost to your ability to succeed in a support role.
Secondary personality bonus would be above average Charisma; you're gonna have to walk into a probably silent office of people ignoring you focused on their computers, and have to be like "Hi, I'm from IT - I'm looking for XYZ-person?" over and over again for like a year till you figure out who people are.
T1 support usually is dealing with support tickets, solving different issues and talking to customers / clients who raised them.
Sometimes it is not going to be IT related at all but you'd be explaining how to use an app for example.
IT is a big spectrum. Since you've asked about help desk (T1 support) then this is it..