Seeking Advice on upcoming Help Desk Interview

I have a job interview in a few days for a Help Desk position. I am trying to break into IT with my degree. I have very limited experience in Help Desk. Majority of my courses were in Programming and database management. Also during my internship I worked with the Database Administrator and I assisted with the Systems Development Life Cycle layout for the intranet with the organization. Other than that I really have no Help Desk skills, but I'm desperate to get my foot in the door. Please give me some advice on what I study for and what type of questions they'll ask. This is also for a government job in California.Thanks so much for any feedback given, it is greatly appreciated!!

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Comments

CodeBlox

If it's first line support it probably wont be so bad. They'll probably ask about basic network, software, hardware troubleshooting. They might throw scenarios at you. During the interview for my last helpdesk position, I was asked "Say you have computer A and computer B. How can you tell that a web server is running on computer A from computer B without logging into computer A?". I got that one right and the answer was to telnet to port 80 on computer A, that way you could issue GET commands and that sort of thing.

jamesleecoleman

I was thinking nmap scan lol. If I couldn't do that then I would have did telnet.

Mike-Mike

when I was on the Service Desk, i remember one of the hiring managers saying they were impressed with one interviewee who said if she didn't know the answer she would just google it.

Essendon

I had an interview for a Desktop Support gig a few years ago.

Interviewer - The CEO of the company needs to go to a very important meeting and needs to print a document, but his printer is playing up. What will you do to help him out?

Me - I'd either get him to print to another printer or offer to print it out for him if it wasn't confidential.

Interviewer - Good answer. A user cannot logon to his computer, the computer boots up fine but the moment he puts his creds is an error pops up. What's the first thing you'd do?

Me - Get him to check the network cable to his computer and in the meantime, check his account in AD.

Interviewer - You are hired. When can you start?

Simple, dumbed down, smart answers get you a long way in this game (and in life, for that matter).