Question for you IT types on a job type

[Indigo]

I had a position for almost 3 years that I really enjoyed, but I can't figure out what it's technically called because "System Analyst" feels too broad. I was hoping that if I described my daily duties for you, you might have some feedback on what the job could be called, or what I can look for when looking for something similar. The job I have now is just not challenging enough - I can do PC support in my sleep. I want something like the old job again I think.

The position I had prior was for HP, and I ran the processes on a server farm that ran queries and optimizations against a Siebel database. The interface started off PHP based, and entailed nothing more than us clicking buttons like trained monkeys when everything was working correctly. It seldom did however, so there was a lot of downtime trying to get things fixed, trying to figure out why a few out of 700 or so individual units (service regions) weren't optimizing or loading into the database correctly.

I didn't actually program -anything- I just ran the scripts and the software necessary to get the job done. The process later moved to an enterprise scheduling application (Tidal Software) and I had to train on that. It automated most of the things I used to do by hand, but I still had to perform triage, watch performance levels, maintain customer contact (HP was just the facilitator, it was a contract with a satellite company). I was the official unofficial (read: no raise) team lead for the team, which was nice, but I don't mind being an underling again (as I am now).

So, System Analyst do this position justice, or does it fall under something else? Was this a once in a lifetime thing, or are there jobs like this out there? I must've written 60+ pages of reference material on how to do this job over the past 3 years, so that was fun too.

I don't have my degree yet (long way out unfortunately, I have to rely on student loans and that means one class at a time [sigh]) and A+ can only get you so far - I want to get away from desktop support, and into something like this again.

 

[root]

to be honest, that can fall under so many different categories,

the button clicking is more 1st line task, or basic software use.

the getting things fixed could be anything from 1st, 2nd or 3rd support depending on how difficult the actual analysis and support work that you were doing for the system was.

watching performance levels is definitely more of a 1st line support task.

perhaps you could say junior system analyst, it sounds like you've been using a few different tools to do some tasks, and have a broad understanding of how it all fits together. perhaps monitoring technician? if you were team leader, and that's recognised the senior monitoring technician.

if you can find your original contract from when you were employed, (or if your roles changed then your newest contract) then you'll find a job title that the company actually assigned to you. -and this would be a better thing to do, whilst you might feel that system analyst sound too grand to what you were doing, if you write down monitoring technician, when your new place calls HP and asks about a monitoring technician that they used to employ, they might say that they never employed one at all!

also, if you were just 1st line support, then writing system analyst might be seen as a bit too much like 'bigging' up your previous job,

they say that all CV's are embellished a bit, but there's a difference between embellishing a bit, and what will look like an outright lie.

The job title isn't really what matters. don't fret over it too much, nobody is going to look at your CV and see one title and think that's not really what they want. the thing that they'll look at is the outline of your roles and responsibilities at your previous jobs.

the reason that I say that is that in the company that I work for our first line engineers do all kinds of work, that's real technical work. other companies, 1st line engineers literally pick up the phone and perhaps just reset passwords, or unlock accounts, for everything else the log a support ticket and escalate it to a different line of support.

 

[Indigo]

Yeah, therein lies the problem, the interview was conducted over the phone, and I went in for my first day without ever seeing an official document (I was a contractor through a third party, if you think it can't get any more confusing)

We all just called ourselves System Analysts, because that's what our contract company referred to us by, but there wasn't any real job title per se. I just look at "System Analyst" jobs out there and they don't really seem to fit what I was doing before.

It was definitely just working with the software and not performing tasks related to end user support, so we weren't technical support.

Oy. I wish I knew what to call it. You're right though - it doesn't really matter what the title is, my resume/cv already has a good layout description on it, and it landed me this current job, so...