Started at my first MSP and have been on board for a few days over a month. After the first week I did a lot of research on what it was like to work at an MSP and mini-freak out subsided as the whole throw the baby into the pool way of working seems to be common at MSPs. I will say that after my first month of being here I am starting to see a few things that I wish I could do something about, but continue to be stopped at every corner. I am supposed to be help desk, but the help desk phone has rang literally twice since I started here. First time was on my second day and I did not have any of my systems set up and the second time was an issue that the only other tech here had already been dealing with. Beyond that I have watched him troubleshoot two other issues and only done about two myself as well. I come from a retail background of Best Buy, but spent about 5 years in Geek Squad before becoming management. I am not new to Tech, but definitely new to backend tech. Currently have my A and Sec which landed me this job and filling in the gaps with Net and then probably CCNA because I got to go setup a server one day and had a lot of fun on the networking side so as for right now networking has become my focus. The start and stop nature of my current job is what is really getting to me. I am trying to research things on my own and be proactive in handling some issues, but I always run into barriers or special caveats of things that are not outlined anywhere. An example is doing monthly maintenance for our clients. I was told to find an old ticket, copy it, and use the knowledge base to perform the work. So away I go, but the knowledge base is all done in short hand with no screen captures etc and each task is broken up into a different article that I have to track down and decipher as well. So basically what I ended up doing was creating a new Monthly maintenance KB, hunt down all the articles and link them under the right tasks. Then it was a couple days of cleaning up each respective article so that they could be followed. This involved me messaging with the only other tech and waiting for responses from him between his busy schedule. Finally get a working document and start moving to other clients when I get a message saying we don’t do monthly maintenance for “x” client who I spent the last hour or so working on “How would I know that in the future or who else do we not do this maintenance for?” Answer is basically no real way to know it and I am directed to an equally sloppy breakdown of what client gets what services etc. Things like this happen constantly or I will try and be proactive and be told that I should not be worried about any issues that are higher than level one, but in the same hour be asked to do something totally outside of the nature of level one. I try to stay on my toes, research everything I can, writing everything down in my own separate documents, but each time I try to get a good rhythm going I run into a caveat or the issues I find has to be taken over by the other tech who has basically set everything up. At first I was a little annoyed, but now i just do what I can, ask questions and literally wait until I get an answer before I do anything to avoid wasting time doing something I shouldn’t. So many times I have tried to be proactive only to be told I did it wrong, or that I did to even need to be doing it in the first place due to less than fleshed out documentation. I even offered to really help clean up the documentation and make it more organized, rename articles, and try to flesh out as many that are in short hand as possible, but the manager/owner and level II tech are so busy and we have a few things going on that make that a bottom priority list item. For now when they ask me to do things I research the hell out of it and take it as far as I can before asking for help, rinse, repeat. This makes me feel very inefficient. The other part of the time I study for network and apply for jobs since this contract is only for a few months. My question to others is what would you do in this situation? Any more you think I can be doing? I am hungry for knowledge, but the other tech and the owner just don’t seem to have the time with everything they have going on. My boss is also very “whack a mole” when it comes to being a manager as opposed to setting direction. He will literally come into my office to give me something to do and by the time he’s finished talking he’s thought about two other things and asked me to do those which leads me to have to get him to clarify what should take priority or him realizing later that he gave me things to do that I know absolutely nothing about. I know I am only a month in, but I’m having trouble wondering if it is me who is not grasping things here or if the way things are setup is making it a little more difficult to get my legs under me? Anyone with personal experience I would love to hear or if you just have generally knowledge on this type of thing. These subs have helped me out so much in changing industries and I appreciate you all!