'Application Support' Jobs

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Soldato
Joined
27 Jun 2006
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Hey folks,

I've applied for a job which was vaguely listed as an exciting recent graduate opportunity in technical support, advertised through a recruitment agency. Following an e-mail from someone within the recruitment agency today, they've referred to the job as being 'application support' related, although there's not enough information to really specify what that is.

I've looked at application support jobs before and sometimes they've wanted people with coding skills and often times people without. I wouldn't be interested in the job if it requires coding but the definition of the role seems to vary from place to place. With that in mind, could anyone in the IT loop or anyone who is in application support give a brief description of what it is and what it entails?

Naturally I will enquire further regarding the position but don't really wish to damage my position by saying 'What is application support then?' :D I've had a quick google but mostly getting support in how to do job applications.

Thanks for any help.
 
In my experience applications support is a role that requires you keep the various systems a company has running. It needs development and SQL experience as you will be required to do bug fixes and data fixes. It may well mean different things in different place but the last time I had a job with that title, that's what I did.
 
One of my previous job titles was applications administrator, but I was basically a systems admin ~ so all thinks AD/Exchange/VMware/Day to day systems, etc.

I did query why it was that job title but they didn't seem to know. Think they pulled it out of their arse.
 
appliction support team in my work arnt technical, they are however masters at certain applications and how they are installed/configured etc. my work have two application support teams, each supporting around 4-5 apps.
 
I'd echo pretty much what Thrash has said.
In my experience it will mostly involve dealing with users when they have problems with the application, performing data fixes to correct bad data, getting extracts of data, potentially doing releases of the software and liaising with the development team when there are more serious issues.

I wouldn't have thought development experience is a necessity as an app support person shouldn't be doing the development themselves, but SQL knowledge would almost certainly be required.
 
Haircut said:
I wouldn't have thought development experience is a necessity as an app support person shouldn't be doing the development themselves, but SQL knowledge would almost certainly be required.
Click to expand...

How can you say SQL knowledge would 'almost certainly' be required without knowing what the application is?!
 
[TW]Fox;18386574 said:
How can you say SQL knowledge would 'almost certainly' be required without knowing what the application is?!
Click to expand...

Because pretty much every app support person I've worked with has had to use SQL.

It may well be that the job title is misleading, but if it does involve supporting an application then when a user asks why something is happening or wants to know what has gone wrong with their transaction generally that involves looking at the database to figure it out.
 
You're not going to damage anything by asking what the role actually is.

"Application Support" could be *anything*, in this thread alone there are people saying what they think it is, which is utterly nothing like the application support roles I've had in the past.

No idea where SQL comes into it. I work on and develop plenty of systems without any sign of a database, it could be supporting a load of VBA Macros sitting in Excel (for example).

Sounds a bit "helpdesky" if you ask me.
 
Haircut said:
Because pretty much every app support person I've worked with has had to use SQL.

It may well be that the job title is misleading, but if it does involve supporting an application then when a user asks why something is happening or wants to know what has gone wrong with their transaction generally that involves looking at the database to figure it out.
Click to expand...

If there is a database. Not every application in the world has a database behind it!
 
Could be anything.... though if they wanted a specific skill set then I'd assume they'd probably have specified it. At a guess therefore I'd assume you'd not be required to code rather you'd likely need to become proficient with an application(s) and support it from a functional/business pov.

I work for a vendor and used to be in a role that would fall under 'application support' we've got support teams for our products split into functional and technical, neither are really supposed to be used as 'help desk' as in 'how do I do this?' etc.. the clients' in-house support teams are supposed to cover that. The techies help to get the system running again when experiencing serious issues, and will look into issues with servers, citrix etc... Functional guys will look at stuff like - incorrect figures, some screen not functioning in the correct way etc.. generally involves replicating issues, liaising with the relevant development team for the module responsible etc..

Obviously some 'bugs' do turn out to simply be bad configuration or lack of user understanding/training and then it all becomes very 'help desk' like. Some clients will have appalling in-house support teams and so stuff that should be handled by them simply gets sent on. Its sometimes got so bad that the user & in-house support person at the client site are in effect not only asking how to configure something in the system but are actually asking outright business questions irrelevant to the software.
 
[TW]Fox;18386684 said:
If there is a database. Not every application in the world has a database behind it!
Click to expand...

hence ALMOST certainly.

I did Application Support for a year at a company in York (Very large one), and pretty much all the apps used MS SQL. And yes, I had to know it well.
 
Most large (well and even medium) companies have DBAs to support the app support people. It's a bonus to know how to run your own queries but I've never known it to be a necessity for application support staff to know SQL unless its a small company and even then they should have basic monitoring of SQL queries. And to be honest the amount of SQL you'd need to know to run a query against your application's database to check it's working could be taught to you in about 2 minutes. If that doesn't work then call someone who knows what they are doing, ie. a DBA. ;)
 
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Too vague a title without any kind of job description, as said it could be helpdesk work supporting office users, or core back end business application support.
 
Go along and ask. There's no shame in that - you're not psychic after all. Tell them you're awaythat different employers use the term for different jobs and you'd like to see a job description or specification so that you can check whether it's right for you. Remember that the interview is as much for you to decide whether the job is for you as it is forthem to decide whether you are for the job, so don't be afraid to ask questions.
 
Just would like to say thanks for everyones help on the matter. It turns out that it's kind of vague for a reason, as the company train you up 'generally' and then specify a role after that - so they leave no stone unturned, as it were.

When I pressed for more information it seemed to be tech support with the addition of some things people had mentioned in here, such as the problem solving of matters, C# and XML among other languages were also mentioned.

Pea0n, it's not a gym but thanks for the GL. :)
 
application support could mean two things

1) supporting word, excel, outlook

or

2) supporting bespoke applications by updating code debugging, messing with SQL tables etc etc etc

however I woulc consider 1 to be "Application support" and 2 to be "application development / programmer"
 
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