Do you want to know what the average salary is for help desk support? More importantly, do you want to earn more than that? If so, great! Read on – I’ve got a few tips to share.
Average Help Desk Salary
The average help desk salary is between $51,000 and $62,000. Of course, this will depend on the company, the region or city you work in, and your skills. The above figures are all from US-based websites on US data, so your countries may vary.
Ok, So How Do I Earn More?
Well, I’m glad you asked! You’ve come to the right place! Not just to Complete IT Professional, where I help IT professionals improve their career (which usually leads to earning more money), but this specific article as well. There are a few ways you can improve your salary working on the help desk.
Get Certified
Arguable the most effective way to get paid more or to get a better salary is to get certified. Working on a help desk will expose you to many technologies, both hardware and software.
The main companies in the IT certification area all offer certifications that are helpful to help desk staff – Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA, ITIL.
Getting certified has two main benefits – it increases your knowledge on a specific technology or area of IT, and makes you more proficient in doing your job. Getting a certification is a great way to prove to your employer that you have the required knowledge for the technology, and is a good way to get a better salary!
Go Above and Beyond
If you’re working on a help desk, you’re likely to report to a manager or supervisor. A good way to get a pay rise working on the help desk is to go above and beyond your job description. You could do this by:
- Volunteering for extra work – whether it is offered to you or not. This shows you’re taking initiative and are interested in helping others.
- Become knowledgeable in a certain area of your job. You could become an expert in a specific technology or piece of software. You’ll become more valuable to the organisation because of this, and you could even share your information with other team members to help them as well.
- Suggest ways to improve process – Just because something is done a certain way, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. If you have ideas on how a specific process could be improved, then raise your hand and mention them to your manager.
Ask for a Promotion
A proven way to increase your help desk salary is to ask for a promotion. After you’ve been working at your job for a while, you might be interested in moving up to a senior help desk position or a help desk supervisor role (Indeed.com mentions the average Help Desk Supervisor salary is $61,000). To get promoted can be a lot of work (I wrote a post recently on how to get a promotion at work), but you essentially need to show you can do your own job very well, and increase your knowledge of the job you’re going for. Work hard and give the company a reason to promote you and with a bit of luck it should come.
I hope these tips have helped. If you have any comments, please leave them below. Thanks!