It’s where Check Point Software’s Mark Ostrowski first figured out how to make cables—like, literally make them. Or where Hyland engineer Brian Blasius learned how to disassemble and reassemble a laptop in a half hour. Or where Drew Rose, co-founder of the cybersec company Living Security, read the manual on a variety of military devices, from handheld radios to satellites.
The help desk: A place that introduces young IT professionals to a range of technologies.
“As companies are beginning to focus on standalone, dedicated teams [for] cybersecurity, or software development, or data management analysis, the help desk touches all of those things and can act as a launching pad into any of those areas,” Seth Robinson, VP of industry research at the trade association CompTIA told IT Brew in February.
IT pros who began at the help desk spoke with IT Brew and shared positive, career-launching experiences from their early troubleshooting times. Aside from the benefit of learning about tech at an entry level, many spoke about a less obvious perk of the help desk: It’s a place to get to know people.
A little help from my (work) friends. A help desk technician provides end-user support for a range of company devices, applications, and systems. (According to Salary.com, the average pay as of December 2023 was $49,106.)
An advantage of the role: You don’t need years of work experience to get going. Another upside? The job involves coordination with other teams and departments to solve problems.
Chris Archer, before landing at the help desk, began a career in retail restaurant management. He met a mentor through the tickets, working on an electronic data interchange (EDI) call that got escalated up the ranks. Archer later moved on and became a member of the EDI support team at Cardinal Health.
Years after that, a colleague from the service desk days had a pitch: "'Hey, I’ve got this role over in cloud. You don’t know anything about it, but it’s a fun space, and they need someone that would think differently and drive strategy,'" Archer recalled.
“I can’t really say…help desk helped me get to cloud versus it helped me in my career and put me on a path to meet people that eventually got me there,” said Archer.
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No help needed. Some IT roles may not require the end-user support experience. Aspiring network pros may just want to drop cables, senior engagement manager at TEKsystems Brian Ridgley, who got his start at the company's support desk in 2012 and found the position a valuable way to be introduced to tech and colleagues, told IT Brew.
But the help desk isn’t for everyone.
“It depends on where you go in IT. For example, if you’re going into the programming development space, you don’t talk to people. You’re behind a computer, You’re given an assignment and you just type the code,” Ridgley said.
The desk can also be a lot of password resets, which may frustrate pros who want to dig in and solve problems. Bernard Brantley, who began his IT career at the help desk of a web hosting company, used the repetitive resets to ask questions.
"What are the systems that I’m resetting passwords for? Why do people keep forgetting the passwords here? Who actually maintains the policy around the password requirements? And so it became an extension into me learning more about what it was that I was supporting,” Brantley told IT Brew.
Those questions led to Brantley finding answers from senior technicians as he began to build up his IT skills. Brantley, who worked in mortgage and retail sales before the help desk, is now CISO at Corelight, a network detection and response tech firm.
The experience at the web-hosting company allowed him to meet pros outside the company from an especially valuable place within the company.
“You are at the center of operations of a company at an IT help desk. You essentially have access to every part of the business [and] later in your career, you will understand how valuable it is to be able to communicate with people across that wide range of business without the same types of barriers that you have when you go into a focused organization,” Brantley said.