Come from technical support

In any self-respecting IT company there is technical support - it should help users cope with what this company produces. But technical support in ABBYY has one more important task: to prepare personnel for other departments of the company.



For all the time of technical support existence in ABBYY, a huge number of people have passed through it. “Support” is a launching pad for a variety of professions. Traditional growth paths from technical support within our company - to analysts, technical writers and testers. However, there are atypical cases: someone went into marketing, someone went into sales or even programming - and there are quite a few such examples. Moreover, many people from support today occupy fairly high management positions: for example, two employees at various times were heads of product marketing at ABBYY Russia, another colleague runs the entire partner network in Russia, the other is a huge Docflow project, sales in Asia, Africa and Latin America.



Why do technical support engineers manage to make a good career in the company? Let's see.

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First of all, we love to grow specialists ourselves (a clear evidence of this is our department at the Physical and Technical Institute, about which our regular readers already know a lot). Training people for their further career growth within the company is one of the main tasks of the head of our technical support service. The work in the department is organized as follows: first, the beginner is actively brought up to date and taught, and when they see that the person copes with most of the tasks himself, they control minimally. At the same time, the employee himself can study the information necessary for work, but he always has the opportunity to turn to his senior comrades for help.





Head of technical support Maria Leibenzon ( masenka )



Secondly, the secret of success is good knowledge of products. Product managers are interested in visiting people who are already well versed in what we are doing. They know how the process of release takes place, who and what in the company is engaged in - namely, such a detailed study of the products and occurs in technical support. In addition, work in support helps to look at our programs from the point of view of customers, to understand what needs to be added and improved, what is important and what is less in demand. This knowledge will be very useful in the future: for example, when moving to the position of analyst or technical writer.







The work in the technical support department is divided into product areas: some of the employees are engaged in Lingvo, some - with data entry products (Data Capture), another part - with FineReader and some - with products for developers (SDK). The same commands provide support for mobile applications, depending on the specific application: mobile translation programs are supported by the Lingvo team, recognition programs by the FineReader command, etc. Usually it is within these areas that people grow further.







As practice has shown, moving to new positions, former employees of support learn faster and are up to date than people hired from outside. In those moments when the company begins to grow rapidly, there is a strong turnover in the department, because employees are in great demand in the food teams.



And further. When selecting people for technical support, we initially estimate what may come out of them. We are not looking for employees who will work all their life in this department. If a person has good development potential, he has more chances to get into the company. At first glance, there are not very many requirements for candidates, as the starting position is, but they all are of great importance for future growth. First of all, this is a higher technical education - we prefer graduates of Moscow State University (mekhmat, physics faculty) and the Physics and Technology Institute. As practice shows, it is these universities that provide the necessary base, which is necessary for our employees. This does not mean that the way is closed for graduates of other institutes - we also have people from Stankin, MAI, Baumanka and others working in technical support. Other requirements include advanced PC knowledge, good English, stress tolerance and good communication skills. And if the applicant wants to support products for developers, he should at least be able to program a little.



In addition to professional knowledge and skills, working in the technical support department allows you to feel yourself as a part of the company, “grow” into it, understand how we live. This happens because the girls have a lot of communication with colleagues from various departments. And it is very useful.







According to statistics, in our technical support department people work from 6 months to 2 years, and then move on. Communicating with a large number of clients requires patience, tolerance and perseverance - and these are very useful qualities, regardless of which career peaks you want to conquer.







Tatyana Panferova



Corporate Communications Service