u/Character_Flight_773

I'm an IT Support Specialist. Currently employed.

I have 6-7 years of experience now and have been struggling with a few things.

I currently don't hate my job or love it. It's very easy, people like me cause I work hard and also am social.

I have over the past 2 months been studying and collecting certs. Most the stuff is information I already knew so they were easy but pertained to my job. AZ-900, SC-900, MD-102, MS-102. I manage/setup Intune for my company and do support for 150 people.

I'm in mid Michigan and there is NOTHING I qualify for here. I don't even get calls or anything for places wanting to interview me, even when I apply an hour away for in person jobs.

My current team is 4 people on IT, 2 managers and 1 sys admin who has been there 13 years. No one is going anywhere and no room to grow here into a new position, I'm the only support guy.

I'm having extreme anxiety, feel like I'm wasting my time getting these certs and with AI agents getting better daily I just feel like the passion I have for IT is dying and making me want to leave. Nothing feels hard anymore to fix, or resolve, Managers are doing 2 peoples jobs now cause they can just ask AI how to set up these services and do it on their own.

Feeling real stuck, grateful I have a job but just not sure what to do. I think about other careers but I already invested my life and passions into this. People keep saying things are going to get better eventually but that was 3-4 years ago.

Gas is $5 here, food all time high, energy costs insane, interest rates on homes not getting better, job market bad. Just feeling like doomed at this point and living paycheck to paycheck without any real progress is getting to me.

Okay, I failed the first time about 4-5 months ago and took a break from studying. I got about a 620 first time with very little studying.

Today on a whim I moved the test up a week from when I had planned because I was doing good on practice test 75-90 percent every time, and had free time and home to myself after work.

I kid you not, I passed with a 700 score on the dot. I am so happy right now. I work as an IT support specialist but manage Intune for my whole company, for past 2 years and have been fighting to get a promotion or new job so I'm hoping this helps move me forward somehow.

I studied by using Microsoft Practice Exams, and prompting Claude to generate me practice tests on subjects I struggled with like security, since I don't touch Defender, we use crowd strike for most things at work. I also had Claude prompt me 50 questions on IOS and Android since i only manage Windows, AVD and Mac OS. We don't enroll phones, yet at least.

This test felt extremely hard, there were questions and scenarios I never heard of or experienced at work. To top it off its a lot of reading and scenarios and I have dyslexia so it makes it much harder.

To build confidence I took a fundamentals cert AZ-900 last week and passed that as well. I studied for only 3-4 hours for that one but since it was my first ever cert that I passed, I was just happy to get some grounding and in the studying/testing environment. Gained confidence for sure.

I'm planning on taking the AI-900 before it expires since I have a 50% off voucher. Then studying for MS-102 or AZ-104 since AVD and Intune go hand in hand these days!