"If you're a help desk guy, you're a help desk guy, and the only thing you can aspire to is your boss' job," says Myers.
Other IT pros beg to differ. "I never think of the help desk as a dead end," says Ronald Kibbe, assistant director of customer support services for medical center information systems at the Ohio State University Medical Center. Working on a help desk, says Kibbe, "can be a career, and it can be a launching pad."
Kibbe says he looks for a mix of people to work on his 28-person team, including those who like to get their hands dirty with technology and those who have "long-term" customer service aspirations.
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Call screeners and help desk dispatchers carry an average annual salary of US$31,293, according to the 2007 Practices & Salary Survey of 758 industry professionals, predominantly from the US and Canada, conducted by the Help Desk Institute (HDI), an association with about 7,000 members in Colorado Springs.
Level 1 support technicians earn an average of US$37,195, while Level 2 and Level 3 help desk technicians earn an average of US$45,425 and $55,211, respectively.
Meanwhile, help desk support managers take home US$69,382, and director-level supervisors haul in an average of US$95,519, according to the HDI study.
You're in the driver's seat
Indeed, most of the dozen-plus IT professionals, managers, consultants and academics interviewed for this story believe career paths for help desk technicians largely lie in their own hands.
Career growth for help desk technicians "is very person-dependent," says Robert Rosen, immediate past president of the Share IBM user group and CIO at the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in the US. "Some people use it as a launch pad, and other people make it a dead-end job," he says.
The greatest opportunity for help desk technicians lies in their ability to learn about different facets of the business, "which makes them more valuable than a pure IT guy," says Rosen. Conversely, "the guys who get stuck [on the help desk] are the ones who are heads down and just want to fix PCs," he says. "And they wonder why their careers are going nowhere."
Scott Steele, a systems engineer at an IT services provider in Bermuda, says much depends on the dynamics of the IT organization.
"In my old company, I saw no growth," says Steele, referring to his five-year stint as a help desk technician at a Canadian oil and gas services provider, which he left last September for his current role. He says there were many senior IT professionals at his former employer "who were there for years and years and weren't moving. I felt like I was getting pigeonholed."
Other factors play into the mobility of help desk technicians. "It depends on the culture of the organization and the maturity of the help desk," says Pete McGarahan, founder and president of McGarahan & Associates, an IT services consulting and benchmarking firm.