Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Not at all. I decided to get back into my love for computers and went back to school for IT in 2016, and got hired in my field 7 months before graduating. My teacher constantly told us, "Unless you enjoy doing level 1 desktop support, do whatever you can to increase your knowledge and skill-set to move up. It's an entry level job with entry level pay for a reason." And he was right on the money. While I am very grateful for the first IT job I got, level 1 work got extremely repetitive and mundane. I grew tired of it about a year into it. But I followed his advice, as well as my boss who said the same thing, and kept learning and gaining more experience. Eventually my job began to dispatch me onsite to assist the level 2 and 3 guys with projects. Then I got my big break in December of 2018, when no one at my job was willing to commute to Manhattan to be an in-house technician for one of our clients.
I immediately jumped at the chance and learned as much as I could while working out there, and loved every second of it. Within the first week of being there, I was racking servers, assigning static IPs, building more machines than I ever did at my actual job, and learning how to open ports and properly run cables from the multiple switches our client had in their server room. I sharpened my skills with making auto-deployment scripts for Windows 10, learned how to manage their VoIP phone system for their network, as well as creating accounts and assigning phone numbers, creating shared drives, etc. I soon found myself in meetings with the Infrastructure manager, bouncing ideas back and forth on ways to help their office environment. It was the best 3 months ever, and I was promised a raise and more responsibility once I was done with the contract.
But when I came back, it was back to resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, creating AD and O365 accounts, and remoting in to reinstall a corrupt copy of Office. It gets boring real quick, and pay raises are far and few between. You can't really make a living off level 1. I immediately started applying for jobs, and an insurance company reached out to me for an in-house IT position. I now have my own office, no longer need to keep a headset glued to my head, get to make executive decisions, and have more responsibility than my old job would ever be able to give me, and I love every second of it. If money isn't an issue for you or it isn't everything to you, and if you enjoy doing level 1 help desk, then stay where you are. If you want more, I would start finding ways to get out of the help desk.
In order to provide a more accurate answer you'd need to provide more info than just 'desktop support' with 40+yrs experience. desktop support varies from org to org with smaller orgs you'll wear many hats doing many tasks. with larger orgs, you could be doing some more specialize, like work only on granting access, pwd resets, fixing printers.
do you have a CV (minus the PII) to share? what are your skills? can you work on macOS? linux? can you write ps/bash/python scripts to automate? are you able to configure routers/switches? do you know AD/GPO? server, storage?
for all we know you could be resetting pwds and changing printer toners for the past 40yrs.
in short, your salary will vary depends on your skillsets and what you can bring to the table.
Yup! My last job was a small IT company, and for being desktop support, I sure wore a lot of hats there. Yet I wasn't getting that "wearing many hats" money. It's why I always jumped at the chance to do PC builds when we'd order new ones for our clients. Beats answering the phone 10 times to reset a password.
Large enough companies (think Fortune 10, not 100) still don't outsource their IT, help desk, desktop support. But why desktop support?
Why not use those skills and apply for a telephone company in their NOC. As an hourly, you have 24/7 coverage and are NEVER on call. You work your shift and go home.
Your right I just thought Desktop Support looks like easy money ? you google things you solve problems and go home no?
We got rid of individual workstations and deployed a thin client for most people. The thin clients are much less likely to have a physical problems. If an image gets goofed up, it's much less effort to reimage and redeploy. Power costs are lower and set up is easier.
That's just one aspect.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
