Hey everybody - hope this doesn't violate any rules here, I didn't see any that applied.

I was laid off from my job of 13 years a couple of months ago. They let people go from 7 different cities that day, and though I had escaped several rounds of layoffs over the years, this one got me.

I started that job as an entry level Help Desk person, moved up to Desktop Support around 2007, ending up a level II.  I have been looking for work and am getting a little desperate so I thought I'd see if anyone here knows of any openings. I was making just over $50k and know that I may take some pay cut, but the few jobs I've seen were so much lower that I couldn't pay the bills with it. I've been selling off ammo, guitars, amps etc and things are starting to look a little dicey as far as paying the rent beyond next month.

I'm in West Plano area. If you know of any leads, please let me know via email: centuryhouse at yahoo . com

Thanks in advance for any help.

Sorry to hear you got laid off. I don't know of anything in that field. Good luck with finding something soon.

where have you tried?
how long have you been looking?
Indeed.com has quite a few and a couple level 2 support jobs.

IM sent.......so do what you do :D

Email sent.

Thanks to you guys for suggestions, and for those of you that reached out with specific things you knew about.

As to how long I've been looking - several months. I've gotten ONE interview so far. But hopefully things will pick up with the holidays behind us.

As to where - Linked In, following up every recommendation friends have given, looking up any companies I liked and could think of applying at, and Zip Recruiter and other such sites.

Send me an email with a resume.  I know a couple of technical recruiters who cover those types of jobs.  

Nuc

if you have that few hits vs the number of resume's you sent out, you might need to have that looked at.

Today your resume doesn't go to a person first, unless you know someone to give it to in that company.
It goes through some HR BS filter to see if you have all the key words in it they asked about in the job ad. if you don't match enough of them, your resume gets bounced.

So you might say something in your resume about trouble shooting with end users and resolving issues. But they asked for receiving tickets from users and solving the ticket.
now you don't match, your resume never makes it to a person.

You can either tailor your resume for each ad to make sure you have all the words the same, or what I do is have a top list of key words that I adjust and leave the body alone.

You should work on your resume. When I was job hunting, I got close to a 90% response rate (to a phone screen) after sending out a resume.

That said, desktop support is a dead industry. These days, your average high schooler can do the kind of stuff that would have been the realm of expects a decade ago. Unless you're working server-side, you're going to have a hard time finding a decent paying job in that field.

What do you have for education and certs?

You can type in all the key words for a position you are interested in, in really small text in white colored font so it is not visible but still trips the resume scanners.

Lots of resources here, OP

Texas Workforce Commission

Don't be ashamed to use their unemployment benefits till you get a new job.

Good luck!

Danny is that you?
I would have asked for your resume to pass it around at my work, but we have had a hiring freeze for the last year. We are only allowed to hire new graduates so we can get them cheap, but we haven't even had any openings for a long time. Plus allot of the IT jobs are getting outsourced to India. They can have 6 guys over there working for the price of 1 person here. Even though their support sucks and all the people that get stuck getting helped by an outsourced person say how bad the service is. The bean counters get to to show how much money they saved the company, but how much downtime the end users have is hard to quantify so they don't see they are actually loosing money.  I see this trend happening allot but maybe now with Trump in, that will start to shift back to having jobs here.

Best of luck and I hope you do find something soon.

Funny, I had just thought about doing that - either using a white color or a super small font.

I have been adjusting keywords to match each ad, but maybe the other strategy will yield more results.

As to formal education or certs, I have some college (unrelated field) and no certs, just 13 years experience on the job.

Thanks. I did use their resources for job hunting, starting 6 months ago.

Certs are fine, experience is better. Desktop Support positions are still alive and well, but lack of college may disqualify you for some companies. I would strongly suggest you work with a good recruiting firm that specializes in IT. Getting a recruiter on your side that can sell you to prospective hiring managers is the key.