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Hello everyone, My name is Sipho from South Africa, I have a question for those of us who work in IT Support/ Helpdesk support. What was your first day like? I am doing my first day of my 6 months training next week in a pretty big company and I dont know what to expect, I already went to Youtube but I want to hear your stories! Thank you

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I’d imagine that your first day at any large organization will be “on-boarding”.

That’s where they introduce you to their various systems and methods for working and supporting you. Reviewing corporate policies, making sure you know how to access your benefits, how to contact IT for assistance. Basically, giving you the basic information you need to know in order to do your job. Security systems and ID cards/badges need to be issued.

Your second day, or second half of your first day (depending on how long the overall corp policies take), would be actual training in the department you’re working in.

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I met with HR first thing in the morning. They got my badge, showed me how to access my benefits, made sure I understood policy, and then brought me and introduced me to the team I would be working on. That took up until about 11 AM (assuming an 8 AM start time). At 11:30, we went for lunch with the team to a local restaurant. At 1PM we were back in office and I started installing all of the tools I would need to do my job with some guidance from a co-worker. The rest of the day was spent going through those programs, the ticketing system, and other software we used to do our job. The rest of the first week was basically like that as well, some of the tickets we would go through together for a more practical training experience.

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Filling out paperwork, watching safety/training videos, meeting all the managers, etc.

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Welcome to the community.

I have a good story for you here. Not my first job, not even close, but a good first day story.

I showed up at the reception desk on my start date, as instructed in the e-mail. They had no idea who I was. Nobody informed them I was coming. They had to call around to find someone in HR to come get me. My new boss was not in. They forgot to tell him they hired me and set a start date. So I’m sitting with HR and they give me the usual pile of paperwork that you have to fill out when you start. The only problem is, they sent that all over e-mail to me, and I had already filled it out.

So now we have the problem that HR doesn’t know what to do with me as I’m now at the office, they have nothing else for me to do, and they have nobody to hand me off to. Fortunately I knew people that worked in the department I was starting in. I sent them a message and they came down to get me.

The person in the dept who basically oversaw access to everything was out for 2 weeks. They would also have been the person that gave me the walk through of, here’s our setup, here is where everything is, etc. So for the first 2 weeks I really don’t have access to much. I get lots of e-mail alerts for tickets and I’m sitting there going, okay I know how to fix that but am I supposed to fix that or is that the service desk, or one of the other infrastructure people. It’s a VMware issue? Great, I don’t know where vCenter is hosted or the access URL. Those types of problems.

A week later I’m at a datacenter with a coworker, and he says can you look at this, and I said sure what’s the portal link? “They didn’t give you that?” No. Where do I find the creds for that? “They didn’t give you access to the password vault?” Dude, they gave me nothing. I got dropped in a desk and left to fend for myself. I’ve been crawling through the network for the last week on my own and have a good feel for where a lot of important things are, but no access to them. He got me set up on quite a few things which made life easier.

It was an interesting 2 weeks starting until I finally got hooked up with appropriate access to things and a list of portals and assets etc.

I survived and thrived there. Moral of the story, just hang in there. Life is going to drop unexpected twists and challenges at you, even 20+ years into your career. Take a breath, define the problem, and then get to work on solving it. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or for help.

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The very first day is always paperwork. The first day of doing “real” work is always figuring out how to document your work. EG, in helpdesk, how do you get a ticket? How do you close the ticket? You’re always worried that someone will call to ask for help with something you’ve never heard of, but your company (or the internet) should have plenty of information on how to fix it. The biggest trick is conveying a sense of confidence.

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When I started in IT at the Help Desk, they had a poster on the wall of a guy behind a desk wearing an army helment trying to answer 10 phones with bullets wizzing past him. That about sums it up!

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I’m trying to recall my very first day in IT. I mainly remember getting basic access & checking & confirming my logins were all working. Then the next 2 weeks were lots of training on standards & procedures along with training with the Lead Tech.

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First day of public education IT was paperwork and learning the imaging system that was in place at the time. Since the teachers were on summer break and doing PD stuff (they weren’t due back on campus for at least a month) there wasn’t much introduction wise to be done. The IT department was 3 people total back then.

For my current job with the state it was paperwork then policies and new hire videos and courses which took about a day or 2 total. I spent the first 5 months in the field so later that week I actually got down to doing actual IT stuff while traveling around the region I was responsible for and meeting folks at the respective Health Units I supported. I did a scaled back version of this when I moved to the agency HQ campus to support the Lab personnel.

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I showed up at the reception desk on my start date, as instructed in the e-mail. They had no idea who I was. Nobody informed them I was coming. They had to call around to find someone in HR to come get me. My new boss was not in. They forgot to tell him they hired me and set a start date. So I’m sitting with HR and they give me the usual pile of paperwork that you have to fill out when you start. The only problem is, they sent that all over e-mail to me, and I had already filled it out.

I thought it was just our HR department that was bad. How in the world do these employees make so much and screw up the most important of details?

Great story by the way, thanks for the share!

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Also, Welcome to the community @spiceuser-ln12! Be sure to introduce yourself to everyone:

Welcome to Spiceworks Community! :waving_hand: - General - Spiceworks Community

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Unfortunately, it happens all over. My wife’s office sometimes gets laptops sent to them from their IT group (based in another state) for remote employees instead of sending the equipment directly to the employee who could be in another state and was hired as strictly remote. People do not read instructions, and it is very frustrating.

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My first day was doing deskside support so after setup I shadowed another tech, and was asked to please come back from lunch, since a predecessor had gone to lunch on day 1 and never came back

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Where I worked before, we had a lady on-board then off-board after lunch, didn’t even last a whole day :rofl:

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First day is normally on boarding but once im at my desk and logged into everything my go to is a knowledge base or documentation if they have it or look in the ticketing system for the recently closed tickets, if your new coworkers are good they document how they fixed it not just reset xyz and closing so you can learn the quick repeditive tasks. also if there is phones listen to the call and try to search tickets and see if you can “solve” it. Never be willing to only solve a problem one way think outside the box.

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Thank you so much for sharing your story. I guess it was pure luck that you knew people in the organization already huh?

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Introduce yourself to the community!

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I spent about 3 MONTHS absorbing information (I certainly wouldn’t call it training…), then I just started to take on tasks that I knew had to be done and no one else was doing…Your first couple of WEEKS will probably leave you feeling pretty useless and “lacking in knowledge”, the trick is to power through that until you get to the point where you feel confident, and they trust you. Some people can’t hack that.

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I’m betting @PatrickFarrell went to that company specifically because of those he knew already, though.

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Correct, they encouraged me to apply for the open position.

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