September 3rd, 2024, was my first day as an IT professional. My first job was working within the central IT of the University of Georgia. This heavily consisted of answering phone calls, tackling ticket submissions, utilizing our online chat service, and lastly walk-in clients. The University of Georgia (UGA) breaks their IT up into each college followed by other sectors that oversee more centralized systems. I was within the centralized portion that dealt with login credentials, two factor authentication, and general IT questions for staff, faculty, and students of an SEC University. This job was not what I expected IT to be.
At its core, my job was to work within a call center. Seventy percent of my day was sitting at a desk answering calls. Twenty percent is completing tickets when time was available or when tickets came in. Although the job was simple, UGA utilized a lot of systems that aren't readily utilized or taught in other jobs, so the learning curve to proficiency was realistically is 3-4 months. I would like to believe I was a quick learner, but this job was notorious for throwing curveballs that only happen every 6 months or even years apart. A lot of team collaboration was needed, and I am very thankful for the co-workers I had at that helpdesk.
During my 6 months at the helpdesk, I genuinely think there is a lot to learn that you can apply to a lot of different sectors within IT. I would say about 60% of the time, I knew how to fix the problem that was given to me via call or ticket. The other 40% was learning how to search effectively. I got some very good practice with this skill through my college studies and also working within a research lab. Most jobs require a base level of knowledge to be successful, but if you aren't able to learn, search, or even research on your own this can delay you growth. A lot of learning comes from looking at what previous people have done to get a successful or unsuccessful result. This is very common within any form of research as a research article is filled with citations from other research articles that help drive their research's point or goal.
Being green within a profession makes it very easy to just ask others before doing your share of research. Even more today with the way AI is readily being used in most aspects of life, people just want the quick answer and not the one that requires adequate brain power. I definitely fell into this path in the beginning of my IT career as I felt that, these skills were meaningless or I would never need to know them in future positions. I wasn't half wrong as I won't need to remember how to reset someone's password or how to change an email alias, but there were a lot of things I did that I will remember in my IT Toolbox.
Another big step during these 6 months was determining when it was time to move on. Personally, I needed to make more money just to make ends meet, but a part of me wanted to make sure I got the most of what I got at this position. From the skills I practiced to the people I networked with, I am a firm believer that you should always make the most of any situation.
To this day I am still grateful for everyone I worked and learned from at EITS, but accepting a job in a more hands-on role was the next step in growing my IT career.
~ Ben Paquette