In the future would we need more help desk technicians?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a selection of useful reports on employment statistics and 10-year forecasts. Use them to determine if the career you are thinking about choosing is experiencing — or is likely to experience — a talent shortage.

Within the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook, you'll want to look at the outlook for Computer Support Specialists, which is the closest analog to Help Desk Technicians. And while the information there is useful, there are a couple of aspects that they've left out.

One is that this field will be increasingly affected by artificial intelligence (AI). As you probably know, support calls and chat sessions typically start with an automated voice or script asking you a series of questions to better direct you. What you may not know is that those voices and scripts, known as bots, have the ultimate objective of resolving your issue or answering your question without ever referring you to a human support specialist. Obviously, the better the bots, the fewer support specialists companies will need over time, which will have an impact on the overall demand in this field.

The second thing about these roles that the BLS outlook gets partly right is that these are typically very good stepping stones to more advanced roles: a support specialist who answers questions or resolves issues around computer security can then, with the right additional skills, advance to a role as a security software development engineer. But this also applies to non-technical roles. Many support specialists, over time and with the right skills, are able to move into increasingly lucrative sales, sales engineering, or sales specialist roles. So there are both technical and non-technical career paths available to those who start out as help desk technicians or computer support specialists, which are, essentially, quasi-technical roles.

And, finally, it's very important to understand that the help desk / customer support function has been almost entirely outsourced now in the technology industry, so that when you call for support on your Lenovo PC, for instance, you are not calling Lenovo, but rather a third-party firm you may never have heard of that is under contract to Lenovo to provide help desk services. These third-party companies represent themselves as Lenovo on the phone or in the chat session, but they are actually different companies altogether, and may in fact be even larger than the client company itself. Examples include Infosys, Concentrix, and N3, to name just a few. Above and beyond a basic level of technical skill, these companies value transferable skills like energy, enthusiasm, and an ability to learn and apply new concepts quickly. Also, these companies are constantly developing their own business models to adjust to the new world of AI and technical and non-technical role evolution, so they are turning out to be some of the most innovative employers in the technology sector.