1st IT Interview today, help?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi all,

Got my first IT interview today which is for a helpdesk role.

The only thing that has me worried is they said that the interview will involve some role plays and a questionaire, but I cant imagine what the role plays are gonna involve.

Any tips would be much appreciate.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Typical example of an interview role play:

A user complains that they can't print, how would you go about solving this problem?

 

would a good answer to that be to check settings under printers, and then if no luck problem there take it further by checking printer etc?

 

seems good enough, basically you will need to know how to fault find... just as you would do when things go wrong on your computer at home...

 

Favourite one we have here is:

"You get in and no one else is in yet. You have 2 problems to deal with:

1. A whole department cannot log in
2. The big cheese boss can't print

Which one do you give priority to?"

For a 1st helpdesk role you'll probably start off just logging calls and escalating them to the relevant teams so the role play questions might involve teamwork and dealing with frustrated people who can't work. I've written a section about that on my site which you cane read here:

http://www.first-computer-job.com/experience.html

Just think common sense and remember that whatever decisions you make for most companies time = money so keep that in mind

Know when to delegate or pass it on to someone else when you think you've spent enough time trying to fix it. A classic mistake people make early on is to spend ages trying to fix something that someone else will already know how to fix in 5 minutes so delegating will be a more productive use of time.

They might ask you how you might to get up to speed at the very beginning, to that one I usually answer:

"shadow a different team member every day - (get to know all the team at the same time instead of shadowing just 1 person) and look through the call logging database of open and closed calls to get a feel for the kind of issues that crop up a lot and more importantly what the fixes are"

Following on from the call logging database thing have a book that you write down each thing you learn that you can refer to. Aim to never have to ask the same question more than 3 times. Having a book is great, it helps a lot when trying to remember what the fix to that annoying error message you saw 2 months ago.



Hope it helps, let us know how it goes and good luck!

 

That is a tricky one Pete, I suppose it's who you prefer to anger the most

 

hehe I failed that question when I got asked it - who does more work, the whole department or the big cheese golf player *oops I mean boss

That's a standard question that every new hire gets asked now lol along with:

"so you've got an NTFS drive and you want to convert it to FAT32, what's the command?"

I think someone needs to join the new millenium..

When they asked me that I said "why on earth would anyone want to do that in the first place". Then I put on my serious face and said "back up all the data and format the mofo" ...

Hey they might want to use FAT32 for a reason (still can't think of one).

They just wanted to hear "no that's not possible" :P

 

Had interview yesterday, and I think I did ok, but they have had loadsa response to job so they wont be able to let me know if I have second interview for around 2 weeks, which is a bit of a buggar.

 

Waiting is always the worst bit. Best of luck.

Si

 

thats normal... at least they will let you know though.

 

yeah it is worst bit, but it is to be expected, like you have said.

In the meantime I will keep applying to others that I see. I search on CW Jobs, Jobsite, Jobserve, Monster, Total Jobs, does anyone know any other good websites to check out?

Thanks for all your help.

 

Converting from NTFS to FAT32???? FAT32 and all its 2gb maximum space.

Why would anyone want to do that???

 

FAT32 has a 2GB max file size - but the partition can be much larger than that!

And there are many reasons (mostly due to legacy stuff) that would mean that such a change was useful.

Harry.