Leaving internal IT job to MSP? Thoughts?

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Hi all,

Just to give you a brief background about myself. I am 30 years old and I have been working in the education sector for over 6 years now as an IT support and considering moving to an MSP since I want to challenge myself and earn a higher income. Since I am so comfortable in my current place.

Had a teams interview with an MSP in the UK as 1st line Support and researched them heavily specifically via glassdoor. Overall from the reviews the employees like working there along with training and development is there too. I want to work from the bottom as 1st line support because I lack the technical aspect the job requires. Plus the salary is only £250 lower than my current salary.

So as mentioned I had the interview today which was the first step and have been invited to the second step. I have notes below of the role along with the questions I have asked with the answers given.

Overview of Role

Customer have agreed contractual hours. Core hours is 7 am to 7pm.

1st line engineer work on shift rotation typically from 8 and 6.

Currently remote working hybrid .

Questions asked during the interview with answers given:

What is the day to day routine?

Tickets come via phone, they are not phone heavy but it its still important because of number of VIP calls they take. Tickets will come in via unopen chat channel through ticketing platform

Most part tickets have been generated allocated into the queue. Have serious OLA and SLA that will determine the order.

Responsibility beyond that is to request escalate. Could be because it requires technical specialism or could be because of workload and you need assistance from another team.

So it’s fairly standard and fairly straight forward. They have fairy good standard documentation. A lot of help to help with more standard tasks

What mistakes people have made in this position?

Big mistakes is people trying to do too much. As they want to gain experience so one of the mistake sometimes holding on to things for too long. A need to see everything through to conclusions. They the company are looking for people who are mature enough to recognize they are not going to resolve something and then raise their hand and find someone they can.

Let me know your thoughts?

 

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It looks like you've got no issues with how first line works as a ticket sorting engine. Remeber it's also a people sorting engine though. What we (the IT industry) want out of a first line is to develop second line engineers and then turn those into 3rd/infra/network/devops/cloud/platform or whatever other sort of engineers we need locally.

In an MSP environment you will see a lot of people responding to incentives, if the service desk is unhealthy, they will be repsonding irrationally to silly performance indicators such as number of calls answered after X number of rings, tickets closed in X days and so on. A well funcitoning desk doesn't stress much over that because they are supposed to indicate that the operation is working well, not to be a target for a frightened manager who will soon lose his job to pursue.

I mention this because I have seen many ambitious first liners pick up bad incentives from the team leader who wants his stats to be great so that he can be the one to replace the dreadful manager when that guy gets his marching orders. As a first liner, it will be a mistake to impress your first line lead with empty ticket closure stats if it means that other teams (night shift, 3rd line, networks) come to see you as a technically incompetent buffoon who closes unfixed issues and doesn't spot that AD isn't replicating or an Exchange store has dismounted.

You can acheive your objectives to learn and progress just as well on a faulty service desk as a good one, which is handy to know because in the MSP world a good one can go bad within weeks of hiring the wrong manager, and the bad ones can be turned around in a couple of months by hiring the right dude. The issues that you might discover via glassdoor are always cultural matters and often transitory.

That team lead who tries to massage his stats to get his boss's job never does becasue those other teams easily identify him as the cause of your misbehaviour by the way.

 

I thought I'd write a user guide