Hello I’m looking for a bit of guidance regarding my career. I’ve had a lot of different thoughts rattling around my head the past few weeks. This thread posted the other day has helped me take a step back and have a little perspective on my situation: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1faa7xp/why_do_american_sysadminsit_workers_seem_more_on/

I’m very grateful to be working in IT now after coming from food service/ retail/ manual labor but there are days where I lose perspective of how fortunate of a situation I am in. I’ve been feeling some pretty intense anxiety recently and I had a few questions:

I am a Computer Support Specialist at a college and I handle my own campus. I am unsure of what my role would normally be titled on job postings. There are some things that feel like they could be SysAdmin adjacent and some things that feel like help desk. At my campus I handle all software installations through an endpoint management system like Intune. Any tickets created at my campus for hardware/software/printers/AV issues are routed to me. Simple things like hardware installation, user support, password resets, etc. are also handled by me. I handle any parts replacement/warranty requests for my campus through Dell Tech Direct. I manage who has what permissions on my campus through group policy in AD (ex. Students need remote access to the labs, I add them to a remote access AD group for my campus then have their instructors provide them instructions for remote access. I cannot create the security groups or change what they can do.) I have created workflows to have my systems “thaw” (DeepFreeze is a reboot to restore software to prevent saved credentials on student/lab machines) and install Windows updates, and Antivirus updates every night. I’m working on setting up an Adobe Update Server to allow all systems to pull Adobe CC updates from an internal server every weekend rather than having the network get bogged down trying to download the updates externally. I will soon start learning about Juniper switched and how to use Juniper MIST. This past summer I worked with my friend who is in the role that handles typical SysAdmin work for the entire organization to implement an ITSM platform. It included creating a new ticketing system, service catalog, project management office, knowledge base and automated reports regarding the tickets. We did not have any of those things before besides a ticketing system. This ITSM implementation is normally a 5 person/6-month project that we got done in 4 months with only 2 people. The ticket volume went from ~200 tickets/month and to over 1000 in the first month. The scope of the project now appears to be expanding as there are desires to adapt this ITSM platform for many other departments in the college (HR, Facilities, Financial Aid, etc.) from talking to our consultant this appears to be a ESM (Enterprise Service Management) solution that sounds somewhat similar to an ERP. It has been a difficult project to implement and we’re beat down and exhausted from working 12–13-hour days (no overtime pay and nobody is telling us to work this late, it’s more of a pride issue where we want to put out our best work.)

I’m kind of just writing my thoughts down as I go so, please bear with me. There are a lot of times where I feel like a fraud because I don’t have an answer off the top of my head. I think I'm honest to a fault with end users and coworkers about not being knowledgeable on a subject but I always ask them to give me a little bit of time to research it and I get to work on getting a solution/answer for them. In my mind I believe honesty and transparency make life easier but, in my experience, I think it causes folks to assume I can't do the job. I see people get shit on for not knowing much about DHCP and DNS in this sub. Since I haven’t had to troubleshoot anything with them, I don’t know much about those other than what they kind of do (DNS is almost like a phonebook that allows easy access to a website by typing in its name rather than it’s IP Address, DHCP automatically doles out IP addresses…at least I think that’s what they are?) I have a master’s degree and a couple certifications. I know those don’t show skill but it does show that I’m capable of learning the information. However, unless I’m working on a real-world issue that I can work through myself I don’t retain the information very well. The conceptual stuff doesn’t really stick with me, I have to take my own notes, try and fail and test a bunch of solutions, and stare at the issue for a while until I solve it for it to stick. I have not had an issue that I haven’t been able to resolve by just trying everything I can think of and using all documentation available or googling it.

With all of that being said, does anyone know what the standard name for my job would be based off of the duties I currently fulfill? Is it anything like a sysadmin, just elevated help desk, is computer support specialist accurate? Regarding the imposter syndrome I feel - what do you guys do to help avoid that feeling? I want to be the best I can at my job but I find certifications to be too boring/don’t seem to be very useful in my case. How do you keep your skills relevant? I always have a fear of being laid off and then not being able to find another job in IT. I’m terrified of having to go back to retail/manual labor/food service as I ran into health issues a few years back and my body was rapidly breaking down. I’ve addressed most of the health issues but if they come back, I don’t think I would last in a physically strenuous job. This feels like it’s becoming more of a therapy post than anything but for any who were gracious enough to read all of it, I would greatly appreciate any guidance regarding the questions in this post!