1

I recently got hired on as a temp at a local manufacturing company as the IT help desk. Because I am just a temp I have no access to AD, or any servers. For the last 6 months I have been doing software installs, upgrades, end user support, pretty much anything that can fill up my time, and keep me busy. I’ve even gone as far as to help other employees clean their office areas and setup cubicles. All said and done though, because I don’t have any clearances I find myself with downtime, and I don’t want to be a sloth on a log. Anyone else ever found themselves in this situation? Any thoughts on how to keep myself busy? I really like it here, and my coworkers seam to genuenly like me, so I would really like to be hired on full time.

47 Spice ups
2

practice and learn powershell, once you get AD access you will have some rudiments of the program and can start learning active directory shell

22 Spice ups
3

Yep, training in downtown. MSVA labs are helpful.

18 Spice ups
4

Many years ago I was in a similar but different position. I ended up creating a tech newsletter that I published weekly. It was a new random tech tip or tech info each week but I wrote it comically. It helped keep me busy and still remained relevant to my job. The bonus - people loved it!

14 Spice ups
5

^^ Never not this!! The MSVA is a fantastic resource which, as far as I can tell, not enough people know about.

4 Spice ups
6

I’m tempted to suggest browsing Imgur, but since you want to keep this job, I’d suggest looking for things do that are often forgotten or aren’t always as high priority at some companies. Crafting a thorough backup and recovery plan-- or on a larger scale, a disaster response plan-- are often things that get left by the wayside for some companies. If you have the time, it may be helpful to bring it up with your peers and managers if they don’t have an up-to-date backup and recovery plan (maybe they don’t have one at all). That can show some initiative on your part, and provide them with something essential to preventing expensive business downtime.

If you’re curious about some resources, we have an online guide that goes over how to craft a good DR plan.

Hope this helps!

7 Spice ups
7

What’s MSVA?

4 Spice ups
8

Microsoft Virtual Academy - great small labs and micro certs

9 Spice ups
9

Thank you!

2 Spice ups
10

Or start creating documentation tht will cure the downtime for a while

9 Spice ups
11

Ye gods, why would you even joke about that? Cutting that habit is the healthiest thing I’ve done for myself this year.

2 Spice ups
12

Spin up a test environment at home with some server or larger PC, create a domain, familiarize yourself with the server versions that are in your production environment.

13

You can clean up that cable mess in the supply cabinet :slight_smile: there is always one. generally make things accessible and neat will give you something to point to and impress the boss.

14

Not sure what your work environment is, but when I have down time or a slow day, I just get up and walk around to the other offices. I check printers/plotters to make sure there are no jams, check out public/kiosk computers to make sure they’re working, follow up with employees who I had recently helped to make sure they’re still happy, etc. Even when I don’t go looking for things to do, they seem to find me. Many people will see me walk by and call me into their office to help them or to answer a quick question.

7 Spice ups
15

Learn all you can and when the time comes show them what you can do. This will advance you in your career. I am a System Admin who has a lot of roles. I learned to program in my spare time and now I had a chance to build an application for my company.

1 Spice up
16

Since I am always on downtime. I take time to read articles tech related and since my company has access to Lynda.com I use that resource all the time. Very happy to have lynda!

1 Spice up
17

Peruse the Spiceworks forums…

3 Spice ups
18

I would say study towards whatever you want to do when you get to drop that temp tag.

Spend time reading up on servers, networking, virtual machines, whatever you think might be interesting to you. Not only will they look good (at least better than it would look to just be cruising Reddit or wasting time) when people see you, but it will be beneficial to you if you get asked to help with bigger projects.

It’s nice to be able to say “Hey, I’ve been reading up a bit on Active Directory. If you don’t mind, could I sit with you for a while and watch you add new users?”,assuming you get a chance to interact with system admins, or network admins. Just make yourself attractive to the company. You may only be temp, but you will definitely get more hands on learning experiences to add to a resume at the very least, and you’ll learn more from the real world hands on.

Oh, and nice profile picture, by the way.

1 Spice up
19

Study, learn, show initiative!!!

3 Spice ups
20

Document all the things! If there is documentation already, read it anyways and verify it makes sense. What made sense to the author may not make sense to someone who doesn’t work with that part on a daily basis, or they may have missed an “obvious” step (I use quotes because it might seem obvious to the a small % of people, but not everyone, and that kind of defeats documentation).

Start spinning up some labs with whatever the company uses and start working in there (if they use Server 2008, spin that up…exchange, spin that up). That way when they do let you at it, you already know your way around.

Nice thing about this field, the only time you have nothing to do is when you want nothing to do. There is always SOMETHING, and you usually don’t have to look far to find it.