Anyone a "Desktop Support Engineer" ?

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When there's 200 applicants they will go for the people that have the degree, as well as some experience in tier1, 2 support, and looking to step into tier 3. Where I work 1st line is the helpdesk where the masses of calls come in and we have a bunch of low paid unspecialised people who can take on a basic understanding of the applications they are supporting and provide advice. it's all about turnaround and getting through the call volumes as quickly as possible either proving a solution to the problem, a workaround, or if it they can't fix it then escalation to 2nd line. 2nd line are still support staff that have a better understanding of the system and have a bit more time to actually try out and investigate escalations in a bit more detail to either figure out workarounds, or at least build a case where a problem can be replicated and can be identified as a defect, at which point they escalate those to 3rdline. 3rd line encompasses software developers and server engineers (AD, Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, Unix, etc.) that have years of experience in their field and can therefore provide the expert support required to fully diagnose route causes for problems and fix it, and for these people 3rdline support is only 1 part of their job. The other is the actual development and improvement work going on to improve the system and applications.

Desktop support are the team that is on hand to sort out building and configuring new computers for new staff, sorting out problems that people in the office run into, and some work on supporting any servers and applications used internally by the office.

Coming out of uni you will probably be able to target 2ndline support before finding your direction to move into one of the many areas of 3rd line support/engineering work, or perhaps desktop support, but for some reason desktop support jobs tend to ask for more enterprise level support experience than 2ndline as you require a broad knowledge and should be good at interacting with people.

Also having carried out interviews for new developers I have to say that if I got a cocky graduate through the door thinking that the job they are interviewing for is their right in life then they will not even be considered for the role. You have to be friendly and approachable to show you will fit well into the team instead of potentially rocking the boat by upsetting people with an elitist attitude.
 
Forget that £20 an hour for your first job after graduating otherwise you'll have a very long and unrewarding job search!

I graduated in 2007 with a 2:1 BSc in Business and IT and have been with a company in central London since then. Started with a few months on the helpdesk, primarily for the experience then went onto Desktop support and now into Infrastructure. A degree is one of the bits for getting your CV noticed but from what I've found, relevant experience is much more important.
 
J.B said:
It's true, there are much more useful and practical degrees that can be done but I think the common mistake people make is 'oh I like computers I could do that for a living. *types computer into ucas website and sees 100s of CompSci degrees*'

Thats my view on it anyway, Im not saying that a degree is a must but Im just saying that a lot of people do CS without thinking too much about the other courses available.
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Yeah that's right. The thing is you should use a computer science degree as an opportunity for exposure to different areas in IT, i.e. networking, databases, programming, web design, etc. and then see which areas you are good at and you would enjoy persuing, then start to focus on careers down that route (there will be many using different technologies), and see what skills you need to develop. e.g. if you like programming you need to descide which languages you want to focus on. For me I followed a path in Java development having done a few years in 2nd line support trying to make an impact to get the opportunity to join the development team. I was fortunate and became a full-time Java developer, but then had to focus skills with things like the Spring framework and our implementation in an MVC paradigm, and various other tools we used, etc. Alternatively you may have decided to go down the Microsoft route and use C# witht he .NET framework. Or you may want to go into databases, in which case is it SQL Server, oracle, DB2, Sybase, or one of the other enterprise level database technologies.
 
I think there's a widespread problem of associating the term Computer Science with typical "IT".

A proper CS course has nothing to do with sysadmin and support.
 
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£20ph for desktop support? AHAHAHAHA. Sorry I don't mean to be mean, but good luck with that.

First to third line desktop support jobs are often the gateway into the 'good' IT jobs but it's hard, thankless, stressful work. Grad schemes are potentially your answer, though a lot of them will bar you for having too much post work experience.

Avoid the big name grad schemes, they're oversubscribed, require ludicrous qualifications and don't pay very well (well some do), keep an eye out for smaller firms.
 
Lucky I managed to get straight in to 3rd line* from my degree in comp sci. Mainly because we're only a 2 man IT team watching over around 20 developers. Which luckily means I don't spend much time sorting trivial issues.

*there is an element of 1st line - printers, reinstalls etc.

Fantastic first job to be honest, they've paid for all my MCSE exams (which since passing has got me a 45% pay increase!), I generally get to do what I like to improve our systems.

Get involved with all sorts of stuff. SQL, ad, networking, vmware, hyperv, citrix, several linux distro's, occasional programming. Official title is a Systems Engineer :D
 
My first IT job was in a desktop support team and involved 1st, 2nd and 3rd line work, for a large employer in the region.

Got involved with most technologies that were around at that time, was a brilliant job to gain experience and gave me the knowledge needed to get my next, more specialist, role.

I think you'll struggle to move straight to third line without any proven server support experience.

£20ph is probably about right for that role, even though it says desktop support that looks more like lower level/unspecialised server support.

Expect to start off in a desktop support (2nd line) at around £10-£15ph.

Remember if the work is for a financial company in London the pay is generally a little higher due tot he working conditions and stress your put under. People want things fixing as quickly as they break as it's all about the £££.

And comp sci degrees mean very little when it comes to support work. My previous work hired people with degrees, but were not fussed on what the subject was just that you had one. Most desktop support stuff can be learned very quickly by most.

Comp Sci degrees are targeting other IT roles like development rather than support and infrastructure.
 
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CraigN said:
what is third tier desktop support ?

the way ive always known it is 1st line is phone support, 2nd line is desktop support and 3rd line is server/enterprise/network support.

Personally i think you will find it hard to get anything over first possibly second line support as experience is far greater than any academic qualification in IT in my eyes.

£20 an hour would be an experienced desktop contractor it is not simply a case of doing a course and knowing everything.
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Tbh, even if they dont actively state that there is 1st line, 2nd line, 3rd line support that's how it works.

At our place we have a 1st line - the person who answers the phone when the customer rings up. Bizarrely these people are called customer service advisors, but their main job is to log an flog. They hand out advice, phone numbers etc.. but do real little problem solving.

The call is logged, then passed onto support. The 2nd line support if you will, who will attempt to remotely connect onto the users desktop machine and actually resolve the issue.

If the customer is on a hosted system, housed in our data centre, and the 2nd line person belives the problem to be an issue with the server infrastructure, it gets passed onto our team.

Officially, 1st line is called customer service advisors, 2nd line are called "Support Consultants" and in 3rd line we're called Hosted Operations Consultants. We don't take customer calls, the same as any other 3rd line support person wouldn't.

There is simply no need for 3rd line to do desktop support. Its installing printers, re-installing windows, removing virus' and other stuff you probably do for free for your family & friends. Stuff I'm glad i don't do anymore :D

[TW]Fox;17826336 said:
You need to be applying for 1st line stuff really surely with no commercial experience or relevent qualifications?
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This

When i started in IT i started doing 1st line support, just doing really basic stuff and logging and flogging calls.

You can start out at 3rd line if you're lucky. We've got a girl who'se just about to start at work who got a 2:1 and spent her placement year designing a CRM system for her "employer" in C # with a SQL backend. We don't expect her to stay, like most graduates i think she's just glad to get a job at all and will have ideas about furthering her development experience.

There are some of us here that don't have degrees (like me), but all of us without fail have several years experience in the industry from before we got here.
 
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I'm sorry but how is £20ph reasonable for that kind of role? Unless my maths is way off, if you roughly assume a 40 hour working week that'd be £20 * 40 hours * 52 weeks= £41600 per annum. That's a huge salary for low level server support.
 
I'm not sure what 3rd line desktop support would be. We have 1st and second line desktop support at our place with most problems resolved by 1st line.

Only on the backend stuff do we have 3rd line.
 
I'd happily work the phones for minimum wage... sadly I can't even get that down here in Cornwall. There's just too many graduates everywhere. Graduates with no jobs :/

It's got so ridiculous that just about +any+ job in the Council is now asking for a degree - because they can...
 
FoxEye said:
I'd happily work the phones for minimum wage... sadly I can't even get that down here in Cornwall. There's just too many graduates everywhere. Graduates with no jobs :/

It's got so ridiculous that just about +any+ job in the Council is now asking for a degree - because they can...
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This is what you get when *everyone* is pushed to go to University. An influx of "graduates" that have a degree but no actual ability.

IT is really bad for this at the moment because you have unemployed people with degrees and experience and the influx of new graduates.

My advice. Don't go into IT as a career. :D
 
SiD the Turtle said:
I'm sorry but how is £20ph reasonable for that kind of role? Unless my maths is way off, if you roughly assume a 40 hour working week that'd be £20 * 40 hours * 52 weeks= £41600 per annum. That's a huge salary for low level server support.
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That's contracting for you. Increased wage due to the benefits you don't get from not being permanent staff. When I did a spot of contract work it was £25-30 an hour and that was only general server support but with some specialist SMS/SCCM work in there.

No sick pay, no holiday, no pension, no job security, usually short-ish term contracts.

Plus all the tax stuff for the company hiring you, remember a proper employee costs them a lot more than just your salary, things like employer NI etc.
 
£20ph for an IT contractor is very much "bottom rung".

Don't forget, this is a contract role - you won't get training, holidays, any slack whatsoever, especially job security. You'll be brought in and expected to be able to do the job to a good standard. And if not, there's probably someone else out there who can.

It sounds like a lot, but it isn't really, not at all.
 
FoxEye said:
I'd happily work the phones for minimum wage... sadly I can't even get that down here in Cornwall. There's just too many graduates everywhere. Graduates with no jobs :/

It's got so ridiculous that just about +any+ job in the Council is now asking for a degree - because they can...
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there are positions there for it.
we've just taken on two new sd1 guys in the last 4 months, neither have a degree (though one is MASSIVELY over qualified)

keep an eye on the NHS jobs website, they do come up!
where in cornwall are you?
 
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