Follow-through, follow-through, follow-through

If you're working multiple cases or multiple tickets, it is very easy to allow yourself to let the less urgent tickets fall by the wayside. Sometimes you'll find some problems "fix themselves" - unfortunately sometimes that means the customer has just given up hope.

Make a point of trying to "touch" every open or pending ticket you have in your stack every day. Even if it's just to make certain you haven't missed something.  You'll be surprised how many things you find you can solve.

The Shortest Tech Support Career Advice Ever

All you need to develop a successful career in the IT and Tech Support industry is an interest in technology and the confidence to search out, record and retain the little details that make computers do what we want them to do.

You don't need certification, you don't need a degree. You just need to be confident in your ability to find information and harness it.

Further education: Codeacademy.com

If you've been on the "Support" side of things for a while and want to start edging into the "coding" side of things, check out Codeacademy - It's a rather nifty "interactive tutorial" site that will get you nicely grounded in string-oriented coding with JavaScript. In keeping with the times, it also provides scores, badges, and other things to boast about on FaceBook and other social media sites.

I've been very "results oriented" in my coding experience - only soaking up as much knowledge as I need to get a specific task done for a specific project. This site has helped shore up the basic concepts of programming, which will make it easier for me to create my own projects.

Two thumbs up.

Tools: A (cloudy) place for your stuff

If you haven't heard about DropBox yet, I'll be happy to tell you about it. DropBox is a free online "Cloud" storage service which provides its users with 2GB of free storage space, and can be accessed through the web or via an App for most operating systems (Windows, Mac, Unix, iOS, Android, etc).  I've found this very useful for porting installer programs, data files, online manuals etc from place to place.

The 2 GB disk allocation is free - you can pay for up to 20 GB of online storage.

The other cool thing about it is - if you refer someone to DropBox, you can get a bit of extra storage for yourself. So..  if you're interested, feel free to click any of the links I've made in this post and sign up for some free storage space.

Scavenger Hunts

Life is more manageable when approached as a scavenger hunt, rather than a suprise party.

- Jimmy Buffet

Technical Support is, by its nature, a reactive job - it's very hard to be proactive in an environment where your purpose for being there is to "fix things".  In my experience, there are two ways to approach the situation:

•  a never ending series of emergencies which require immediate, adrenaline-laden flurries of frantic activity to fix whatever was broken (and try and prevent that from happening again); or
•  a series of interesting challenges which can be overcome with enough research, questioning, and learning (and can then be documented so you can recover gracefully 

I leave it to you to decide which way leads to less stress and irritation at your customer base.

 (and yes, we're back on line - your humble blogger got himself a new contract gig and has been, well, busy doing tech support - we'll get more info and useful tools out here shortly)

 

 

 

The new gig: Hitting the ground running

Starting a new job means getting an idea of what the work environment will be. While some companies take the time to provide an orientation period, in many cases once you're in, you're moving. If you have the time to do so (say, the weekend before you begin your new job), try the following:

Spend some time getting familiar with the area around your new place of work: This will give you an idea of the environment, possible places to go for lunch, where to go when you're almost out of gas, and other useful bits of data.

Spend an hour or so checking your favorite online map site for alternate routes to and from your new gig - where do you go if the freeway is at a standstill? Can you get from here to there on surface streets alone?

Get an idea of the size of the company. A company with 120 employees "supports" differently than a larger, more spread out company.  The kind of support you provide (ie: sterling) should not change, but the manner in which you provide that support might be different.  Do they have a system in place to log requests or is it a more informal "can you help me with this?" environment?

Learn the location of the restrooms, fire exits, break rooms and vending machines. This information will help keep you sane when it's time to get up and walk away for a moment.

Read over any information your company provides in regard to internet usage. This is a big one especially as some companies are beginning to crack down on the use of streaming media sources like YouTube and Pandora. Find out what's OK and not OK to do at work before you try learning the hard way.

Learn people's names as quickly as you can. Start with your immediate supervisor and coworkers, then work your way out from there to the other teams and support people.  Always learn the names of the admins, secretaries and receptionists. They're the ones who really run things.

The more you know about where you're working, the easier it will be to work there!

Seek Free Knowledge

There are always a few - a few - moments of relative quiet in the day of a tech support rep. If you have access to the internet, why not use it to track down additional information you can put to use?

Try running a search for free (your area of interest here) tutorial - most of the results you will encounter will provide at least a basic education in the field, programming language or program you're interested in, which can justify your adding it to your skills and experiences list mentioned in Monday's post... which can lead to improving your options and opportunities moving forward.

On top of all that - it's free knowledge, which is always a good thing.