Got a job at an MSP late last year after transitioning from Retail Management (Best Buy). The first MSP I worked for was not a good fit. A team of 3 including me with poor documentation and everything done on the back of the other tech that was there. At the beginning of the year, I landed a job at an MSP that is 3 minutes from my house, has people I know working there and is a really good learning environment. I am reaching my 3.5 month mark there and up until this week I was feeling pretty good. So far I have done two full rotations of on-call, but this weekend has been hell. I am the primary on-call for my team and was dealing with two different issues from about 330-930 last night and then picked up again with them this morning. We run on-call in week rotations. So I have been the primary since Monday and while the week was mostly ok. I am about 50% for fixing tickets on my own vs. having to ask for help or escalate.

A little backstory about me I am 35 and took it upon myself two years ago to get the hell out of Best Buy after suffering burn out multiple times, stress leading to substance abuse, and just a general deterioration in my mental health. I am very motivated and did my research going in and lurking all these subreddits to know what I was getting into and be in for. It is not the work that is getting to me, but a few short comings that are starting to be exposed now that I am being given more freedom to work on my own. I have obtained my A certification and Security . I am currently studying for network plus since my current MSP is very heavy on the networking side. I don’t know if it is what my specialty will be or where I want to end up, but for now it is keeping me very interested because I get to learn the structure on which most things work. While it has been nice to learn these concepts on my own from the certifications, I am finding that my “theory” of the concepts is not as helpful in practice. I do look through past tickets, use Google, ChatGPT before I try to ask for help etc. but sometimes it is things that are specific to our organizations that are either not known or have some sort of unknown caveat about them that the more tenured techs just seem to know.

My question to those who have some more tenure in the IT world is, how did you handle the anxiety etc. of when you are left to your own devices. I find myself sometimes forgetting the basics because I am too worried about solving the problem quickly etc. I had a hell of a day yesterday and this morning with some tickets that came in that I felt were simple and kind of were, but in each I was missing a small piece of information like ticking off one setting etc.

For now I am keeping the tickets in my queue even though they are resolved so that when I return to the office I can sit with one of my Tier 2s and go over some thought processes about how to go about things and what methods to use when you feel lost. I have a running list of concepts that are my week areas and will spend my own time researching YouTube videos, guides, etc. learning more about those topics. Also reached out to my Tier one lead to sit with me again and show me some of how our documentation is laid out (it is in the middle of an overhaul and is not the best. I am actually going to propose me and another tier one take up the project of getting all companies and clients up to date with accurate device ,network equipment and configurations in our documentation system). Reached out to a tier 2 who I am pretty close with an have hung out with outside of work to see if one night a week we can meet up and just go over some concepts or tickets that I may have had issues with. I figured I could help him with his Sec stuff since he is studying for that and he can help me with Net since he already has his.

Any tips and tricks that you used in the past, YouTube channels with the basics of troubleshooting and common problems or just a resource that you think is valuable would be greatly appreciated. I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way so I figured I would put it out there and see what others say. Thank you!