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Working yourself out of a job

Part of the job of tech support is to reduce the amount of calls you are getting in the first place (if possible). After all, if you are getting less calls, and having less issues, that means everything is working.

There are several ways to do this. You try to educate your users, so that simple issues and problems are no longer something they need to call or email concerning. You can make information available, in the form of “cheatsheets”, FAQs, or other documentation, which will eliminate a certain other percentage of calls.

In short, you do everything in your power to work yourself out of a job.

There are two reasons why this is nothing to be alarmed about; for one thing, you will never be able to work yourself out of a job. You will have some users who refuse to take responsibility to figure things out, even if they have simple help documentation available. You will have stray issues that are not and cannot be documented, and these just need to go through troubleshooting as they arise. There will be hardware problems, which will always require a person to take care of them.

The second reason is, if you were ever really able to set up processes so that things ran so smoothly, so effortlessly, that everything could be done without you, you would be far too valuable to let go.

So go for it; work yourself out of a job. After all, one way to be promoted is to render your current responsibility automatic.

2 Responses to “Working yourself out of a job”


  1. 1 Gapp

    I like it - unfortunately, I don’t see ever working myself out of ISP tech support - BG and I support a revolving door of ignorance. Once you educate and inform one user, another joins to take their place…it’s, um, I think the word I’m looking for is, HOPELESS. Ha ha…it’s not all that bad, but I don’t think I’ll ever find myself with that situation. :-)

  2. 2 Phil Crissman

    Right, well… that’s true. There are certain things that will always be necessary.

    In your environment, your best bet in this area is probably to make the FAQ/help pages as robust and complete as possible — of course, that won’t help if the individual’s problem is that they can’t get online…. ;-)

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