So, my biggest dream in life is to be what I call “World’s Okayest IT Guy.” Read into that whatever you’re going to, whatever. To me, that means I want to be a good tech person. Okayest always meant to me you’ve got to stay up with all the changes tech is always going through. It’s always ideas and processes on a ride that are constantly being refined and played with. I like that. I always say I love tech because I love chaos. I’m always in tech for the chaos! That brings me joy in life.
I will always be an IT person as I have a few small certifications and the Ph.D. No one can take that away from me. I’m trying to get the paid gig, though. At this point, I need to show off documentation, get additional certifications, and go somewhere with that generalized knowledge, so I will use this section of my website to talk and do that. Maybe I’ll go for something specialized too. I don’t know. I keep coming back to cybersecurity. I’ve scored some Cisco and Microsoft badges there.
Since going to grad school in 2015, my personal life has been a help desk. I like that. I kept little notes and put links and things like that into Microsoft OneNote, and that’s how I ran Candice’s Help Desk. It’s not something I can show off to people who might want to hire me, though, to showcase my help desk experience. So, when jobs are ask for experience with ticketing systems, a bunch of scrawls and OneNote links weren’t showing much. It’s the kind of thing that gets the job done, but probably only makes sense to me and no one else. It was a relief when I did the Google IT Support certification, and what I was doing was matching up with proper ticket systems. They covered things like addressing connectivity issues first and addressing the things people need to get their jobs done as long as they are done when they are not disruptive. I was making my own notes around this.
I was job hunting the other night and was like how I can better show experience with ticketing systems. I started looking at open-source ticketing systems. Then, I went to the Jira website. Employers ask about Jira, and they have a free plan!!! Sign me up, Batman!
So, I am coding this to show that I’ve moved my personal help desk to Jira and now have rad experience there. If you’re trying to break into tech, sign up. It’s free, nothing to lose, and a pretty rad way to formally organize. There are formal tickets as opposed to my scrawls, that I called tickets, and then I would diligently move through the scrawled notes.
I’m learning how Jira works just by experiencing Jira. It’s pretty intuitive. There’s YouTube videos too, which has been an awesome way for me to learn tech stuff over the years. Someone with a headset in screen capture mode walking me through something is a rad way to learn.
I like Jira. Here is a picture of it. It has a clean, easy interface.
