You practice a task with guidance and check your work with someone experienced.
Roles to look for at this levelHelp desk trainee
Shadow a support specialist as they diagnose a ticket.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
Roles to look for at this levelNetwork support trainee
Practice a network check or restore a backup under supervision.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
You take responsibility for your own assignments and complete them independently.
Roles to look for at this levelUser support specialist
Own a support request from the first conversation through the fix.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
Roles to look for at this levelSystems administrator
Take responsibility for a system change and verify that services recovered.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
You guide technical decisions or coach colleagues. A lead may do this without having direct reports.
Roles to look for at this levelTechnical support lead
Guide colleagues through difficult tickets and review their fixes.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
Roles to look for at this levelNetwork technical lead
Coordinate the technical response to an outage and mentor other administrators.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
You oversee the work of individual team members. The job may include scheduling, coaching and reviewing their work.
Roles to look for at this levelService desk supervisor
Schedule the support team, coach staff and review their work.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
Roles to look for at this levelSystems team supervisor
Assign work and coach the people who keep the network running.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
You coordinate managers, multiple teams or a department and translate broader priorities into their work.
Roles to look for at this levelManager of support teams
Coordinate several support teams and negotiate staffing across them.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
Roles to look for at this levelInfrastructure department manager
Set priorities across infrastructure teams with different technical leads.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
You help set organization-wide technology priorities and investment decisions.
Roles to look for at this levelIT director or chief information officer
Set service priorities and decide where to invest across the organization.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
Roles to look for at this levelInfrastructure director or chief technology officer
Make organization-wide decisions about infrastructure investment and risk.
Illustrative title. Check the actual duties at your workplace.
Start with your day-to-day responsibilities. A title like “network manager” can mean managing infrastructure, people, or both.
Think of a difficult ticket. Did you resolve it, guide another person, or decide how a team handled it?
Think of the last outage. Did you fix the system, coordinate the work, or decide where to invest?
What are these titles based on?
Door Notes groups examples by responsibility. BLS describes how IT managers’ titles and duties vary by employer. O*NET documents the work of support specialists and systems administrators.
MIT recruited Thompson from high school. Working nights on its Whirlwind computer helped him pay his way through college. He later became a branch head and mentored teenagers.
His oral history records how he entered computer operations. The route from that work to a role at your own employer still needs a local record.
Door Notes