For instance, he's had people from his 50-person staff move into IT roles in the hospital's purchasing department as well as into desktop support and application development. "It's natural osmosis," says Olive. "You get exposed to different facets of our IT organization."
When employees indicate they do aspire to move up, Olive says, "we'll provide them additional training in areas like desktop support so that when there's an opening in that area, we can move them right in."
In fact, organizations use the promise of training and a future career path to solve another help desk problem: convincing high-quality workers to take those jobs in the first place.
Despite the opportunities that working on an IT help desk can offer people, it can be difficult to persuade recent college graduates to accept an entry-level role there if they have loftier ambitions.
"The kids coming out of these higher institutions are expecting these $70,000 to $80,000 jobs and nice cars, and it's tough for the employer to say 'Here's where you start,'" says Neil Hopkins, vice president of skills development at the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).
One way to attract recent graduates with high expectations is to offer entry-level IT workers the training and certifications they'll need to advance in the IT organization, says Hopkins. "There are a lot of individuals who would be delighted to take on a help desk role if their careers were mapped out for them," he says.
Despite all the benefits and positive career opportunities, it's still hard to break long-standing perceptions, help desk proponents acknowledge. "You don't get a lot of people who say, 'I want to grow up to be a help desk analyst,'" admits HDI's Hand.
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IT veterans have divergent opinions on whether it's more advantageous for upwardly mobile help desk technicians to specialize in a particular technical discipline or to serve as a jack of all trades.
For his part, Roland Kibbe thinks it depends on the individual and where his or her passions and strengths lie. "Right now, we have a young man on our staff who is very gifted with a security bent," says Kibbe, assistant director of customer support services for medical center IS at the Ohio State University Medical Center.
The staffer's interest in security is one of the reasons Kibbe recruited him from the organization's PC deployment area last August; he is currently studying to become a Certified Ethical Hacker.
On the flip side, Kibbe points to a jack-of-all-trades technician in his organization whose ability to learn on the fly led the medical center to put him through an extensive two-week, 80-hour training program last summer. Now he's equipped to help the group's shared-services organization roll out training for an outpatient medical records initiative, says Kibbe.