How Important is Experience on Your IT Resume?

Experience needed to launch or advance your IT career is a difficult thing to quantify because there are many different factors that need to be considered.

Where is the best place to start? What is the next progression step in your role? Will it require more soft skills/people skills or more technology skills? Maybe it will fall somewhere in the middle.

Today I will try to measure some of the logical paths for experience in major IT roles and answer the question that’s on every IT candidate’s mind: How important is experience on my IT resume and what kind should I have?

[NOTES FROM THE FIELD] — This article will look at the experience and knowledge across desktop and server support roles. There are simply too many topics to cover if the discussion trailed off into specialty roles like security, programming, database administration and so forth. Sorry.

Why Experience Counts

Without exception, it’s important to have experience and knowledge in any Information Technology role. It starts off being that you’re expected to have a lot of theoretical knowledge and less practical knowledge and that will begin to balance out as you gain actual on the job experience.

As you mature in your role and where you go is largely set by what drives you. Is it job satisfaction? Pay and benefits (compensation)? Making a difference? Working for a small business? Working for a non-profit?

With all the variables it is very difficult to pin down exactly what experience you need to have. A non-profit might want you to have a good understanding of the IT parts of your job but at the same time have a solid understanding of their mission (their entire reason for being).

I’m going to try to keep the focus on IT roles using the assumption of a generic midsized company. But try to keep these things in mind as you read through this post.

 

Support — Tier 1 and 2

Gaining experience in a support role generally means working at a help desk and then from there potentially hardware and/or software support, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you must work every role in natural progression. As an example — I never worked helpdesk and I barely did desktop support before I jumped into a server role.

As a summary, the following is a list most in the field would consider the natural progression of experience for someone working as a support professional supporting end users in a business environment:

 
• Help Desk

• Working with the customer on the phone to resolve issues
• Documenting fixes for a solutions database
• Follow up with customers
• Escalation to next level of support

• Operations Support (monitoring/tape backup changes)

• Manual system monitoring (uptime pings, trouble tables, etc.)
• Manual tape backup and rotation
• Live feed monitoring (visual uptime/virtual monitoring)

• Hardware Support (build/repair/troubleshoot)

• Taking base systems from loading dock and bring them up to specifications
• Adding memory, video cards, etc.
• Swapping out failed components
• Performing warrantee work
• Diagnosing Tier 2 and higher issues
• Escalation to Tier 3 — direct vendor support

• Hardware Support (installs, moves, adds, changes – often termed IMAC)

• Rolling out new desktop/laptop systems to end users
• Recycling old systems
• Moving users between locations
• Upgrading systems

• Software Support (installation/configuration)

• Adding new programs
• Making settings and configuration changes (to the application or the overall system)

• Software Support (troubleshooting/escalation/critical systems)

• Dealing with failures/error codes/crashes
• Working with 3rd parties/vendors/partners on issues encountered
• Correcting user changes that resulted in impacted or failed functionality

In recent years (and with much of the off shoring of help desk support) most of the Help Desk level jobs are gone as are many of the Operations Support roles, as those tasks are software automated and most backup systems do not rely on front end tape systems any longer.

Additionally much of the hardware and software roles are now merging into the two buckets and are even glomming into a single role.

The reason I broke them out into six items is that these are the traditional outlines of the progression steps within this role and despite the fact that for the most part they no longer stand out on their own, these are still all necessary skill levels to have.

[NOTES FROM THE FIELD] – While I had outlined that I never worked a help desk I did need to understand the concepts and functionality of the role in the enterprise I worked in.

Additionally, you could begin side branching into networking or security from here or into programming or database management.

Support — Tier 3 / Server Administration

Unless your background is more people centric than technology your most likely point of progression from Support – Tier 1 and 2 would be to Support – Tier 3 / Server Administration than say to begin managing the people of any of the support groups, although it is not unheard of people going the Support – Tier 1 and 2 route to get better knowledge and understanding of the position before attempting to manage that staff.

Based on the idea that a natural progression through the role would maintain, this next series of skills would be the ones to consider being mandatory for progression through the role:

• End User Support Escalation to Vendors/Partners

• Working with 3rd parties/vendors/partners on issues encountered
• Recovering lost data/system backups/restores

• Server Hardware Builds/Configuration (hardware and software)

• Racking servers/cabling array management
• Running power coupling cabling/configuring backup battery setup
• Operating system installing and upgrades
• Configuring services and applications

• Server Administration (Support/Support Escalation)

• Working with 3rd parties/vendors/partners on issues encountered
• Recovering lost data/system backups/restores
• Dealing with system downtime and customer impact to business
• Day to Day operations/maintenance/management

Progression from here generally leads to greater span of responsibility and some branching of role execution at a higher level:

• Datacenter Support
• Server Architecture and Design
• Infrastructure Architecture and Design
• Datacenter Architecture and Design/Capacity planning

Since this level of role breakdown begins on the enterprise side of branching into specialty areas we won’t go into any additional detail from here.

 

Soft Skills and People Managing

As I write this, every past tech lead and manager that’s ever had to keep a reign on me just flinched because I wrote that section heading. I was the guy back in the day that would code into my trouble tickets in the resolution field “PEBCAK ERROR” or “ID 10 T PROBLEM” and then define that back to the customer if they saw me write it down and asked about it.

As a complete overlay to all the technical roles and experience that you gain, you need to be able to deal with and handle people (better than I used to — I got away with cowboy diplomacy back then; I wouldn’t survive today doing it that way). End users from all walks of life are not always going to be rational when they are on a deadline, when their system goes down and they are not going to ever be truthful with you when they think they can blame the PC.

You will need to make sure you have the ability to convey empathy (or BS that really well) with respect to their problems and issues. You need to reassure them that you understand the sense of urgency for resolving their current issue and work to get that done as quickly as possible.

The customer you are handling could be a single end user who simply must get the Excel spreadsheet completed for an 8AM meeting the next day that they ended up fat fingering the DEL key on; or a Director of Operations of a datacenter whose business is losing $100,000.00 an hour having systems offline at their own hand from a lack of procedure and planning.

To both of these people their needs are equally great to them and both of them will consider all other possibilities of why the issue is impacting them with the exception of their own doing. You will want to smack them both and despite being equally deserving of it you cannot.

Sometimes too, it is completely not their fault and they are victim of their environment. The Excel end user cannot control a crashed hard drive any more than that Director of Operations controlling a cascading network failure from a problem at the ISP.

Having the proper soft skills ability to manage the non-technical parts of the problem (while working the technical issues) is critical to additional success in all of your technical roles. Being able to properly manage the customer’s expectations and make them satisfied that you’re correcting their issue is just as critical to properly resolving the problem itself.

 

That’s a wrap for today — I hope you found this post a good investment of your time.

I am always looking forward to any feedback you have on this or any of the articles I have written so feel free to drop in some comments or contact me directly.

Additionally, I would welcome any suggestions topics of interest that you would like to see and based on demand and column space I’ll do what I can to deliver them to you.

Best of luck in your studies.

 

 

Related Posts:

• 10 Tips to Writing an IT Resume that Sells
• Getting Started in IT: Desktop Support Role
• Moving Up in IT: System Administrator Role
• How to Break into the IT Industry and Get the Job You Want
• CompTIA Network+ Certification … Why I think It Is Important!
• Get Your Dream IT Job: Different Roles in the IT Field
• Working in IT: Role Responsibility & Job Expectations

 

One Response to “How Important is Experience on Your IT Resume?”

• Michael Says:

  June 17th, 2009 at 9:42 am

  What a good post. It will be good if you can write something about how to get experience when you have all the papers in the world and nobody wants to give you a chance to gain experience. I am doing Network Administration in a 450 user environment for the past 18months and the stuff is so easy I always ask myself what was the fuss all about experience, if you are hardworking this can be taught to any person.
  Thanks for Trainsignal of course that helped a lot to gain that extra experience that nobody want to teach you.

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