Support Engineer For A Large Software Company

How I Got The Job

My Education: BA, Business Management, Bryant University (Smithfield, RI) MS, Information Technology, Southern New Hampshire University (Manchester, NH)

My Prior Experience: I began as an associate support engineer, doing software support for a business application company. Before that I worked as a restaurant manager. Yes... I changed careers. It can be done!

My Job Profile

My Company: My employer is a large software company. In fact it is one of the largest software companies in the world.

Job/Career Overview: In my current position I split my time between two things:

providing software support to our customers and working on ways to prevent further problems from arising.

I provide software support to people who use the software my company makes -- and not just to customers but to other support engineers. I have been doing my job for such a long time that I help other people troubleshoot the software when they're dealing with especially complex problems and need help. Teamwork is a key to success in almost every business.

But we are working on ways to prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Lots of common software problems are, at bottom, compatibility issues and they could easily be avoided if users adhered to a checklist like the following:

• Be sure to have the correct versions of other software on your computer: Java, Windows Media Player, etc.

• Be sure to upgrade to the most recent versions of the software you have so that obvious bugs have been caught and repaired. Often browsers (Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, Netscape) send out new updates automatically. Sometimes these updates are helpful other times they create more problems.

These are simple examples but I think you get the idea. We want to provide a way to prevent problems so our customers will like our software better and encounter fewer problems.

All this requires me to work with many people from around the world. But being able to understand a problem and its impact on the customer is fundamental.

On a typical day, I'll be testing a new version of the software when someone interrupts me to alert me to a big problem that users need help with. I have to drop everything because customers cannot run their businesses if a problem with our software is bad enough.

If you like a challenge, are good at multi-tasking and also enjoy customer service software support is a good place to start an IT career.

More Insights: I changed careers 15 years after I graduated from college. To be honest I never was focused on what I wanted to do for a career. I wish I had started in the computer industry earlier. I did learn how to work with people in my first career in the restaurant business, so I guess that helped me to be a success at what I do now. When I tell people I was a restaurant manager they are surprised because they think I was in computers my whole life.