But I Need More Experience!

So you've landed your first IT role and you're thinking, "how can I use this Help Desk/Service Desk newbie job to gain more experience or knowledge and climb the ladder, I need to to build my resume!" Well, here's how you do that. I call it the 'Help Desk hack' or 'Service Desk Scheme'. The key to this hack is having access to your company's ITSM or ticketing tool (Service Now, Remedy, ZenDesk, etc) or even emails that detail IT issues and procedures. On the surface level these things are just annoying tedious things that most IT professionals and users hate to deal with. But you're not 'most' IT professionals, you're a future IT rockstar and you think like one. To you these annoying ticketing systems, documents, and tracking tools are the knowledge jackpot. To you they are a database of virtually every IT issue your company deals with (at least they should be). They also include the solutions to solving these various issues. Let me break it down more.

1. Customer submits ticket or sends email detailing IT issue
2. Help Desk/Service desk reviews this ticket/email
3. The issue is verified, then either troubleshooted, resovled and documented or troubleshooted, not resolved, documented, and escalated.
4. Once escalated, the ticket is usually resolved hours or days (maybe more) later.

The final result is an updated, start to finish record of this issue, if, how, and when it was resolved, and even who resolved it (so you can pester them for more info). And this exists for ALL other issues reported, (assuming you have access to the ticketing system/tracking tool and it is used correctly), no matter who was involved and when it occured. Use this to add more techology related experience and skills to your resume. For example, if you read a ticket that details a user's issue with their Outlook email, you now have learned more about Outlook, can honestly list it as a tool you're familiar with, and give specific details of a real life scenario involving it! This is great resume and interview material. Especially for the 'Detail a time when you had to use....' questions. Now go learn from those random tickets/emails!