Working IT Call Centers
I've been working in a call center for ~3 years and I know a few people who have been working through two company buyouts who have been at the same location and job for 20 years through many pay freezes. I want a more technical postition than level 1 - follow our empty knowledge base. I've been working with management to fill gaps, but it is very a ungrateful job and different managers handle feedback differently. I want to go looking for a SysAdmin or start with an onsite tech job, but have a hard time hearing back from IBM and other telecom companies around. I hear from many companies calling about my LinkedIn, but once I send the actual resume they are unimpressed. I am struggling to stay on with the contracted company I am assigned to as they have been giving us a hard time compated to our offshore team on agent metrics for what I am worth to the company. I keep myself busy with other things and I've managed to do extra work - account creation and request management - for the same base pay on other clients. Is there anything that i should change? I feel very underutilized with my background. I was a wire technician for home and businesses for media, network, and security. Afterwards, there was a dry spell and then it took some time to come to where I am now. All my prevoius managers have all been happy with my work too. I try to keep myself well rounded while at home and up to date by Homelabbing with web servers machine virtualization, and activly managing a personal godaddy domain. I also keep up by maintaining my 44net lan, applying different uses for my RPi3, and staying busy with various beta tests and bug reporting. I even have tried to keep up with my amazon aws and azure machine instances, but i keep cancelling during extended trials.
You seem very motivated. Thats always a good thing. You need to have some certifications if you dont have names of big brands attached to your resume. These could be related to Networking-Cisco, database-Oracle, windows-Microsoft, virtualization-Vmware and even Linux for sysadmin. Python and chef/puppet would help a lot. You can always buy course on Udemy/Coursera or likes. And you have to apply intensively and interview. Target local mid level companies or Universities. Use good contracting companies whose clients are good like Aerotek, apex, insight global and all. Don't get tired until you apply for atleast 500 jobs and get atleast 50 calls and start interview with 10 companies(that has always been my ratio). Good luck !
Are there online trainings you can do? Sysadmin or coding boot camps? How about making you LinkedIn more accurate, that way you get more conversions?
I don't know what is available for system administrators, as that's a fairly broad scope. I think there may be some local networking that I can do with special interest groups locally that could improve that too.
Doom, if you don't know what kind of certs or boot camps are available for a sys admin, I question your knowledge and upward mobility potential. Generally, moving off the phones and up from tier 1 support means you've found an expertise or have a large knowledge base with some deep knowledge about certain subjects. As someone who made that move in my career, I'd recommend some introspection as to your value prop and where you really want to go. If the answer is just "up from here" you're going to have a hard time convincing higher ups that you'll bring true value beyond your current role.