Useful Support Analyst Qualifications, career progression

[Shicky]

Hello all,

basically looking advice from those in the IT world, preferably those who have been through my situation. Basically I've been working in support / dev, however it has become more and more support work and actually a lot of unpaid 'management' work.

I of course do not want to stay in support forever and would ideally like to try project management but getting to this from support I imagine would be pretty hard? Any experience here?

I have an opportunity to do some professional qualifications paid by my company and I'm keen to do so and take advantage of the offer, the problem comes in when I consider....which qualifications do I go for? For example they're most keen on finance exams or java exams.

I've told them several times my interaction with java is zero right now and I see no way for this to increase (I also feel it would be a mistake to do the exam without working in java each day) and finally, I do not want to be a dev so this has limited appeal / point.

Finance exams have more point but are a lot longer and my background is computer science, I do not see too much point in a lot of finance exams for myself as my applications are spread over a huge amount of finance areas.

So basically this leaves me with other tech exams or project management exams such as PRINCE2. My considerations right now are PRINCE2 but understand most have a negative view as it doesn't mean much in terms of management skill (regardless it would be a step in the right direction), SQL Server quals though right now the difficulty of what I'm doing doesn't require any advancement, C#.NET as most of my projects are based in it, though I'm not doing much code work at the moment.

Anyone able to offer any ideas? Is there qualifications people consider very important for support staff looking to advance within support or advance in general?

Thanks everyone

 

[scorza]

Have you got your ITIL (service delivery) qualifications? Might be worth considering those.

 

[Raumarik]

I've just gone into IT security which involves project management of two fairly big projects for our organisation - that's direct from IT support (third line).

I got my Prince2 training a few weeks ago, but to be fair Prince2 is mostly common sense, albeit structured to a silly degree with language that at times doesn't help but it is mostly about planning, delegation and understanding you and other peoples roles. Not exactly rocket science.

You seem to be firing a shotgun and hitting lots of qualification rather than setting your sights on the end goal here. Decide what you want to do and aim for it - even if you don't get those qualifications. If you want to project manage, ask your manager to allow you to project manage IT projects more, start small and prove yourself. That's essentially what I did.

If you want to be a developer then go for it, but seriously you need to make your mind up. ITIL/Prince2 are worth having, but not if you'd rather be a developer, then they come after developer qualifications and experience.