Smart Techs Don’t Know Everything

“Smart techs don’t get stuck.” This belief is wrong - and it’s one of the fastest ways to kill your confidence on the help desk. When I was first starting on the help desk, I thought you were supposed to know everything. When I was confronted with a problem I didn’t know how to solve, it felt like I was incompetent. That’s exactly why the help desk feels so hard early on for most new techs. This made every unknown problem feel like proof that I didn’t belong in IT.

Yet, how is “knowing everything” even theoretically possible? There’s no way we can ever know it all. I began to realize this as I gained more on-the-job experience. There was always a new problem every week - one I hadn’t seen before.

One day, I brought one of these problems to another tech with much more experience than me. To my amazement, he immediately started Googling to find the answer. This made me realize that no matter how long you’ve been in the tech industry, there are always going to be things you don’t know. 

I used to think, “I’m such a newb. How am I supposed to fix this?” Now, I think, “Wow. This is a unique problem. I haven’t seen it before.” Notice the difference? I used to place the blame on myself. Now, I put the blame on the problem. You can know what you’re doing and still run into problems you can’t fix at first glance. This shift in perspective makes it so much easier to interact with users. Instead of sounding timid and nervous, I gained confidence and became comfortable with silence as I thought of solutions.

With this change in energy, people see you differently. Instead of looking unsure and cautious, you look confident and capable. How you hold yourself speaks volumes to the user. Your tone gives away your emotions. If you act stressed and nervous, people will often assume you’re new. A calm and patient help desk tech is the key to success. I’ve received thanks many times for my patience in walking through a problem with the user. Although users appreciate speed when you’re able to solve something quickly, they value a calm and confident help desk tech more.

When you don’t know the answer, Google it. Users will assume they have a hard problem, and when you figure it out, they’ll be all the more grateful. In the world of tech, there’s almost always another person that’s experienced the same thing you’re troubleshooting. Why not benefit from their experience? It doesn’t make you less of a tech. It frees up more of your time to help more people.

Googling requires you to know your stuff. If you know nothing about the subject, you’ll just try any “solution” you come across. That’s a massive time-waster. You need to filter out the solutions that you know won’t work. So really, Googling well indicates that you’re actually pretty bright.

Confidence on the help desk can certainly come from personality (some people are naturally more confident than others), but mostly it will come from repetition. Once you’ve seen the same problem a couple times, you’ll realize you know how to solve that problem. The longer you work, the more solutions you’ll gain over time, until the day comes that you only have to Google one thing in a day instead of with every call. The only way this happens, though, is if you dive into the users’ problems and actively learn how to solve them. Otherwise, you’ll stay stagnant.

The help desk is just as much about mindset as it is about knowledge. There will always be moments when you don’t know the answer. The question, then, becomes how you’re going to handle these situations. Are you going to take the easy route and pass the ticket to a senior tech without looking twice at it? Or are you going to dive in head-first and learn something new first?

The difference between junior and senior help desk techs isn’t knowledge - it’s how they handle not knowing. If you want a step-by-step method, check out how to handle help desk calls when you don’t know the answer.

If this mindset shift makes sense but you still freeze in the moment, that’s a structure problem - not a knowledge problem. I put together a short, free call-handling guide based on the exact process I use on real help desk calls, even when I don’t know the answer.

Get the free guide: 5 Steps to Handling Help Desk Calls with Confidence