If someone on your team is looking to move on from your Support team, how do you prepare for this?
Navigating Your Career in Customer Support is Support Driven’s advice column about crafting a career for yourself. Whether you've just landed your first customer support job or you're a seasoned pro, navigating your career can feel challenging. In this column, you'll hear from hiring managers, recruiters, and people who've made big career leaps. They'll share strategies, tools, and their experiences, all to help you craft your dream career. From your first job to that big promotion, Navigating your Career in Customer Support will give you all the support you need to build a career you'll love.
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If someone on your team is looking for a lateral move. Let’s say, they would like to move from your Support team into the Marketing team.
What would your first reaction be? How do you prepare for these situations? Would you be in a position where you could encourage them to make that transition or introduce to folks in that team, if needed?
— Seeking to Support Career Mobility
Sarah Betts, Manager, Customer Support at Alyce: I imagine my team gets sick of hearing this, but I tell them I’m here to help them grow. Full stop. If their ultimate dream is being an airline pilot, then my job is to help them get there.
So far, no airline pilot requests But a member of my team is transitioning over to the Product Team (I’m hiring her replacement now! shameless plug ) It was also announced that a former member of my team who transitioned to the Backend Dev Team last year was just promoted from Jr Dev to Level 1 Dev.
When someone expresses an interest in another area, I find projects for them to work on that help build those skills. I reach out to my fellow managers and work with them too. Our company benefits by having someone with deep product knowledge instead of hiring someone totally new to the product, and the individual gets to develop a new career under people who already know them. It’s win-win.
Natascha Winkler, Head of Customer Service at SafetyWing: I absolutely second @sarahbetts’ approach. As a leader, I see my role in supporting people and helping them grow. Over the last almost 15 months (since I started), 4 of my team members have transitioned in other departments. Some of them have been promoted as well.
My team has one of the highest NPS in the company and they are engaged and motivated to do well in their current role. Customer Support/Service is often seen as a dead end road (and I made the experience often enough in the past) that I want to show it can be different.
Rather than having people leave because I put a ceiling on their growth, I encourage them to come up with solutions s and ideas that benefit the company as a whole.
Do I have to hire more often? Absolutely yes but seeing their progress shows me that we are on the right path.
Mariana, Manager, Technical Support Agents: I completely agree with everyone’s approach here. During my first one-on-ones with my team members, when I was promoted to Manager, I told them my goal as a manager was to help them achieve their goals - be it in Support, learning or growing within the company. I think it’s a sign of a successful manager if your team members evolve and grow within their career, even if that means they leave your team.
I also agree with @sarahbetts that it is such a benefit to the company to hire and promote internally, since the onboarding period is shorter and the employee is already a product expert.
Kat Corzati, Head of Support at Clockwise: +1 to all the above! I think the only thing I worry about with internal attrition is pay—will the new opportunity pay the same or better, and what if the promotion/raise/salary track?
I really like dissecting lifetime earning with folks to make sure they're making their best financial decision as well, as long as they're open to discussing it.
Community Member A: Big agree to all of the above! Keeping talent in the company is a win/win and these are such beautifully written thoughts.
Adding also that your People/HR team may already have some guidance around internal transfer eligibility. For example: Do teammates need be in good standing/meeting expectations in their current role to be considered for a transfer? Does it need to be after a set number of days? If such guidance exists, it could be a good way to set expectations for yourself and for teammates who express interest in an internal transfer.
Andria DeFulio, Customer Experience Manager at Fastmail: Adding my +1 here to what's already been said. I love to support everyone on my team reach their goals—often it means we create a role that they're individually well suited for. Agent growth is how we got our first project coordinator (now product manager), our support engineer, two support team leads, and a support specialist who does a lot of technical writing. Agent growth is really the best possible reason to have a vacancy on the team!
Miles Goldstein, Technical Support Leader - Enterprise Software: Like everybody else here, I agree with what Sarah and the other commenters said. The one comment that I did not see was that people won't stay in a "dead end" job; if you can't develop them within the company then they will go elsewhere for their next stop. Having them move and grow within the company is a great selling point and boosts the morale of everybody else on the team. If they know there is growth available within the company they will work to be ready when "their" opportunity comes along. Plus, I joke with my team that it helps me plant "my agents" on these other teams who know what our job is like and will help/support us in their new roles. 💯
Megan Seeley, Head of Member Experience at Flodesk: 1000% encouragement from me as their manager. When someone is on my team, I’m all for them and their growth. The bottom line is not everyone in a CX role wants to grow there, and that’s just a reality. If I can help anyone and everyone on my team grow into other departments to use their skills, I’m more than happy to do whatever I can to facilitate that. Absolutely echo @sarahbetts sentiments regarding the benefit to the company but I’m also this enthusiastic if the growth leads them away from the company.
Hiring is always an adventure but I think of it as finding more amazing people to mentor and invest in.
Zabrina Ting, Head of Customer Success at Hailo Data: I developed a stretch program when I worked at Unbounce to help people on the Support Team to reach their goals.
Support reps are experts in both the product and customer voice - it just makes sense to me that if we could retain that knowledge within the company with a lateral move, we should try our best to do so.
The stretch program was born because I had a direct report who was very interested in Product Management and was absolutely killing it in their Support role. I worked with the Director of Product to build a mentorship program - someone from Product who had an interest in gaining leadership experience paired with my report, and over the course of 1 quarter they did job shadowing 1 day/week and completed a project together. Both sides gained the experience they wanted, and shortly after took their next desired steps in their careers.
People wanting to make lateral moves is so common, and I think stretch programs are a great and resource-light way of balancing the needs and wants of the individual vs the business.
Happy to chat more about this with anyone if they're interested I love talking career development.
How did you figure out what was next for you career-wise?
If you’ve transitioned from a front-line support role to another position (either in support or outside of support), how did you realize you wanted to make that move and what did you do to make it happen?
— Looking for My Path
Sean Tanos, Recruitment Partner: Director of Support -> Recruitment Partner. Did it within the same company, was actually recruited by the recruitment team to join. I've always worked with start-ups and high growth teams, so I've always been heavily involved in hiring as a manager, and this felt like a good way to grow a new career.
BethAnne Freund, Knowledge Manager at Harvest: I’m still part of the support team at the same company and still answer a few tickets here and there, but a few years ago I transitioned to a full-time Knowledge Manager role (for support-related content, like the support team’s internal knowledge base and the customer-facing help center).
I’ve always been interested in clear, helpful writing and took on more and more of the documentation work back when we didn’t have anyone officially in charge of it. I like helping customers in tickets, but I really like helping them help themselves so they don’t need to wait for us to answer and so our agents have more space for more complex issues. Over the years I worked with my manager, who thankfully also really believes in the importance of documentation!, to spend more time on this aspect and then build a career path for it.
Cyn Newman, Senior Customer Solutions Engineer at CivicScience: I moved from front-line support to support engineer at my last company, and now I’m a “Senior Customer Solutions Engineer,” which means that while I give feedback on customer queries, I mostly do tech writing and software QA. I didn’t so much make a decision, but I gradually assumed other duties until I didn’t have time for frontline support anymore.
Amanda Coy, Customer Support Manager: Support Manager > Marketing Project Manager > Engineering Manager > Support Manager.
My first transition out of Support, and all subsequent career transitions, came from a desire to flex and grow new muscles. I began to identify transferable skills and areas where my skills were lacking. I set up time with coworkers, in the position I was interested in, to pick their brains, understand the day to day, and get recommendations for resources/self-led learning opportunities.
After all my moving around and experiences in different areas, I found that Support is where my heart is so I found my way back with a bunch of new skills.
Miles: As a Director, I've ventured in and out of pure Support several times. I have taken on: QA, documentation, rapid repair, implementation, and tech ops. Some of those have been in addition to running Support teams; most have been transfers within a company (and sometimes subsequently getting hired into that different role).
Every time I was away from pure Support it was because I was bringing customer sensitivity and processes to the role. Earlier in my career I thought "distance from front line" equated to career growth; I've since changed my position on that, and am driven by ability to influence customer experience.
At the end of the day, I am a "Support Lifer", though that's an attitude and approach to problem-solving, not a chained-to-a-function thing.
Sanoop Pi: Moved from frontline support to support management to customer success.
Move to customer success was to have larger understanding of business and realizing of bottom-line impact of the role. Also, to gain the knowledge to move up vertical ladder with knowledge of 2 of the 3 post sale verticals.
The most important thing to make a move is to understand what one wants to do over next 5-6 years. It’s okay to try different roles as early as possible, fail/success and realize as early as possible.
In my time in support management I was blessed to have people move from front line to Engineering QA, support QA and technical trainers.
Kathyria Rivera, Learning Program Manager at Brandwatch: I moved from Customer Support Advisor > Senior Customer Support Advisor > Learning Program Manager within the same company.
While on the support team, I really enjoyed understanding how our complex product worked and writing. As a senior, I specialized in QA, handling feedback for the team, and enjoyed onboarding and training people with our product. I realized that I really enjoyed sharing my product knowledge with others and had a knack for breaking down complicated terminology.
When I became a Learning Program Manager, it was part of a self-service area under the support team where I created enablement for support and CS. From there, the self-service area was then moved to its own unit under the Customer Education team where I transitioned into creating courses for a customer-facing academy.
It took a bit of exploring and identifying my strengths to get to where I am today and I’m still very much passionate about educating others to see the value in our product.
Sarah Cullerton, Customer Success Operations Analyst: Frontline Support > Onboarding > Support Queue Captain > Support Manager > Operations. I was a Support manager for about 3 years and we didn't have anyone in operations, so I was doing a lot of work in that area side of desk. Ultimately it became clear that ops was more where my passion lay and where I was going to be able to add a lot of value to the dept, so I was finally able to sweet talk them into creating a dedicated ops position. Have since continued working in Support Ops at two more companies since making that initial transition and couldn't be happier.
How important is it to keep my resume under two pages?
I’m finally updating my resume, but it’s officially 2.5 pages long and I cannot condense any more. All info is relevant, goal or results based, and was previously edited by a professional resume service aimed at beating the ATS. Thoughts?
— CV Savvy
Cynthia “Arty” Ng, Staff Support Engineer at GitLab: If the application doesn’t say it has to be less than 2 pages, then 2.5 is generally fine?
If you need to cut it down, I recommend cutting out the stuff that’s least related to the specific job you’re applying for
Jason Yun, Co-founder/COO at Relay: Congrats on the update - I always feel like it's a fun/huge accomplishment.
I'd recommend to not cut any further. Whenever I chat with sourcer/recruiter buddies about this, I'm consistently told that the one-page resume is pretty arbitrary, especially if your professional record is strong. If you need to toot your footprint and it's 2.5 pages (and relevant + metrics based), then keep as is.
It's also helpful to keep things intact for any JSON keyword searches folks need to run if the application pool is large.
Megan: It’s hard to say without seeing how it’s laid out to make it 2.5 pages.
The length isn’t necessarily an issue by itself if it can be scanned easily for the relevant info, is laid out in clear sections, and if it is all relevant to show career or role progression.
That said, it depends on the role I’d be hiring for. Personally, as the hiring manager, if it’s entry or even mid-level I take pause at seeing a several page resume. It wouldn’t be an immediate no, but I would want to see why it’s that long and take it into consideration.
But if it’s for a senior or leadership position, it’s not off-putting if you’re showing a clear history of the skills and experience you bring to the table.
All of that to say - if you’re confident in it, and you’ve had it professionally edited, submit away!
Miles: I agree with a lot of the above - leave important stuff in for the ATS systems to find. Also, keep it short if you are entry-level, longer for longer careers. The most important tips (imho) are to make it easy for a real person to scan (e.g. single-column, bullets), and put the most important stuff on that first page. If they're interested, they'll read on.
I redid my resume a few years ago (I've been working in my career for over 40 years). First page is an intro paragraph, some keys areas of expertise, and some key career highlights.
Second page is the four most recent jobs (from the last 14 years) - I dropped the entire career history. (They can see that on LinkedIn if they are really interested.) Each job has only a couple of bullets of key information.
The final page (if they actually get that far, which honestly is doubtful) is education, external activities, and other info (articles I've written, technology I've used, etc.).
Capture them with the first page, as it may be all they see. Give them some relevant details next. Put in the ATS keywords last if they are not already covered. And KEEP IT EASY TO READ. Don't forget to check for typos, consistent grammar, action words, and all the other "resume advice" you can read everywhere. (All IMHO.)
Scott Tran, Founder of Support Driven: What I used to do was keep a “master version” of my resume and trim/summarize any jobs I had that were not directly relevant to the job role I was submitting the resume for.
About the Editors
Stacy Justino is a career coach as well as Customer Support Manager at Loom, a video communication platform for async work that reduces time in meetings, helps you communicate more effectively, and stay connected to your team. You can find her on LinkedIn or at Double Jump Career Coaching.
Stephanie Gonzaga works as a Support Specialist at Doist, the makers behind productivity apps Todoist and Twist. She’s worked remotely for almost a decade. You can find her on LinkedIn and her website.