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I agree with your assessment that a help desk or support position would be a good match for your skills as you've described them. You say you can't find any right now, but the jobs are out there; I know someone who just recently got hired for remote helpdesk work. Don't constrain your search to looking for just tech industry helpdesks. Helpdesks and call centers can be found supporting all manner of industries and segments, be it remote education software, point-of-sale credit card readers, one of those medical machines that goes beep in hospital rooms, or those tablet-like computers a mechanic uses troubleshoot a car's engine controller. Tech has permeated into society to a greater degree than even us techies sometimes appreciate, and wherever there's a broad enough deployment of something, there's going to be people who need or want technical help with that something. Start looking up every company you can think of, big and small, new and old, and hunt down their job listings, looking for anything that sounds like it could be mainly tech support work, whether or not the listing actually calls it that. Also worth looking at are contracting and temp agencies, as often tech support is an out-sourced role. Since you don't have a technical work history yet, look to the time you've spent tinkering, say, during your win98/Ubuntu dual-boot adventures, for example. Find times you had a hard problem to deal with. How did you solve the problem? What was your process? How did you deal with impediments to solving those problems? That's something you'll probably get asked in an interview for a tech support position, and it will be good to have some answers. Do the same with your customer service experience. Come up with examples when you dealt with a particularly difficult or unhappy customer, and were able to help them solve their problem to their satisfaction. Once you manage to land a tech position, become a sponge. Start soaking up technical knowledge. Seek to understand the Why behind the How. If you have specific tools, dig into those tools' nooks and crannies. See if there's ways to use the tools better. Become valuable as the guy who's really good at figuring out how to solve a particular class of common problem, or taming some arcane tool your team has to use. And if documentation is lacking, leverage and polish your communication skills to create or improve documentation. Doing this will set you up for being able to move up from the basic entry level role, into something more advanced that hopefully pays better, whether that's moving up in your original company or finding a better position with another company. |