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Top Tips to Future Proof Your IT Career

Technical expertise is only part of the equation for IT support and service management. The most successful IT professionals stand out because they’ve mastered the essential soft skills, cultivated a growth mindset, and taken ownership of their career paths.

18 Tips for New IT Support Professionals

Starting a career in IT support can be both exciting and challenging. The stakes are high with technology constantly evolving and users relying on seamless operations. To help new IT support professionals navigate their journey, we asked our LinkedIn community for their best advice. We've combed their invaluable insights and summed them up here with eighteen expert tips.

Case Study: Shift Right - What to Do When IT Self-Service Costs More Than In-Person Support

At Atlantic Health System, the onboarding process expects new team members to remotely update their passwords, set up multifactor authentication, enter their banking information for direct deposit, and attest to attending a virtual orientation, all in different systems and each with different dependencies. They were doing everything "right", following the industry trends, shifting left, and keeping costs down by having new team members complete their tasks on their own through self-service portals. It was a poor experience for everyone involved.

Bridging the AI Gap

Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionize contact centers and IT service desks, but many organizations are just beginning their journey toward full AI integration. Despite AI's potential to enhance workforce efficiency and customer value, most organizations rate their readiness and maturity levels as low.

A Practical Toolkit for Technical Support Leaders

There is little doubt that 2023 was a year of staggering change, kicked off by the public release of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the form of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the very end of 2022. Within weeks, the tool garnered 100 million users, and the terms Generative AI, or GenAI, were appearing in blogs and news stories everywhere. Competitive products like Google’s Bard launched quickly, and productivity software soon began offering AI “copilots” designed to assist us as we write content or design graphics and illustrations—or handle incident management tasks. The way we work is changing.

None of this should have been a shock; predictions about AI and its role in support have been around for a long time, as this SupportWorld post from 2016 shows. The upshot: people at all levels of an organization are becoming even more dependent on technology to get work done. When there is an interruption, they need to get back to work rapidly, and that falls to the support organization, whether it’s the service desk, desktop support, or an escalation group.

Navigating the changes can be difficult, so we’ve put together some practical advice to help you as you plan for this year and beyond.

This guide includes:

• Top metrics and the changes you’ll want to consider
• Better ways to collect feedback from the consumers of your services
• How to analyze and act on feedback to drive improvements
• Benefits you can derive from new-generation ITSM tools

Case Study: State of Michigan DTMB Client Service Center

The State of Michigan's Department of Technology, Management & Budget (DTMB) Client Service Center (CSC) embarked on a transformative journey to elevate its IT support services.

Facing challenges such as lack of trust, high turnover rates, and operational inefficiencies, the CSC sought to evolve into a world-class IT support center. In 2018, they partnered with HDI, leveraging their Support Center Certification process to drive significant improvements in their operations, employee satisfaction, and overall service quality.

The Dawn of the AI Age: Advice for Tech Support Leaders

AI will have major implications on the future of work. However, harnessing the potential of AI is not without challenges, from understanding where and how to integrate AI into daily tasks to ensuring the accuracy of AI-generated outputs. The key to successfully utilizing AI lies in understanding the intricacies of tasks and identifying the right strategy to incorporate AI into the process. This report will look at four important topics and provides a framework to implement AI into service management processes.

61 Inspiring Tips for Technical Support and Service Management Professionals

Have you ever wondered how other service management professionals approach common challenges like meeting SLAs, retaining talent, or improving CSAT?

HDI has partnered with thousands of professionals and their organizations for more than thirty years to improve their performance. Over the years, through live Twitter chats, events, and discussions, our community members have shared thousands of tips. So, we decided to compile some of our favorites to share.