My first IT job interview

[bobsim]

The demand of this field has been always high and there is a bright future in this industry. If you want success in your life then you should work hard.

[Vision33r]

Then the system isn't working like it should. Tier 1 needs to be held accountable and there needs to be some metrics in place to determine when and what calls get passed up to the next level. Tier 2/3 should be specialist roles with expertise in given areas and L1 should operate on a more general level. Nothing says L1 can't have sub groups within it to get a little more specialty based if there are people stronger in one area, but not up to L2 standards.

Here is the thing- if first level support people, desktop support, help desk, etc people don't feel that they have a career path and can move up in a position, then they have no incentive to learn and grow into those higher roles. It's up to his company to have a clear path to desired roles and requirements to get to those roles.

In reality very few CIOs and directors understand or care about actually making support work for the business. When people call about a problem, the only metric these big whigs care about is whether the phone call is picked up and logged. Whoever gets to look at the problem is not in their interest.

For example my group's chief area of support is mobility and we get ridiculous support escalation just as someone who can't open their Outlook Mailbox on a corporate laptop. Someone in the 1st to 3rd level support never really troubleshooted the problem just goes by a check list of what problems and solutions, if the problem does not match or compute then escalate to the logical group.

I've had countless battles between dept heads and most just sigh and say get used to it. Imo, I would rather hire a few good team leads that will handle the escalation and hold people responsible then just let this unproductive cycle to continue.

In the end, most big whigs don't give a rats ass about support until someone complains directly to the head and managers have to make an apologetically call or email to the users to soothe things out.

[Papa Dras]

In reality very few CIOs and directors understand or care about actually making support work for the business. When people call about a problem, the only metric these big whigs care about is whether the phone call is picked up and logged. Whoever gets to look at the problem is not in their interest.

Once again, you have shown me that you really have no idea what you are talking about and I just don't understand how you are an IT manager. Do you realize how long a company that relies on support and services, in any manner, would be in business if this were true? To somewhat see your point- I have come across this in companies that rely on their vendors for support, but in reality, they still care about having the problem resolved in the quickest possible way. They may not care about who is resolving it, but they sure as hell do not only care about the fact that the call was picked up.

[SpiffyGTI]

haha, I think it's the complete opposite - virtually all CIOs and directors care very much about making support work for the business. That's one of the single greatest purposes of an IT department - support. Any CIO or director that doesn't get this will be (or at least should be) quickly out of a job. IT departments enable their users with technology and support those users. You're looking at the metrics of how you see some managers measure calls coming in, which is only part of the story, but you're way off on thinking that they don't care about getting issues resolved.