In my experience, jobs that have employees working multiple departments are a red flag. Employees should usually stick to one task and learn how to be great at it before moving up.
I understand this entirely; the only statement I can make about “wearing multiple hats” at work, is the companies I’ve worked for (both the former employer, and this one) are both very small, so sometimes there’s not enough of your work to keep you busy, and making yourself useful for other departments is key to maintaining your employment. Sitting around waiting for work to fall from the sky, is not a good look.
In any company that has even 4 or 5 people per department, it should never be a problem. at my former employer (the first one mentioned in the original post), we had 5 or 6 support-focused team members, I rarely stepped outside of MSP support, beyond generating leads for inside sales to existing clients for stuff they needed from a technical aspect. at the “new” place, most deparments had fewer than 4 people. The team I was on, was three support techs.
What irked me, is that as MSP, I had to know everyone else’s job, but nobody was required to cross train on my team. All the other departments were solely focused on their specific tasks, but since I had to take total ownership of all the needs of the clients assigned to me, I had to know how the ISP operations and voice operations team’s jobs entirely. That was problematic for me. I raised the issue a few times and did not get positive responses. I persisted in succeeding at the role regardless, but I still didn’t like it. If I got a support ticket that was for an add/change/remove for a VoIP extension, I should have been permitted to forward that to the voice team and continue with my normal work, doing little more than traffic control on the ticket as a result; if a company wanted faster/different internet, or had an internet related issue, I should have been able to do the same for the ISP team, but it was expected that I would make my best effort to find and solve the problem before I engaged with that team, so I still had to know their job.
The irony of the whole thing is that the other departments jobs were so straight-forward that I was often able to do their jobs better than they could. I’m not meaning to brag or anything that I’m better or something, I don’t believe I am. With my specific disability, I’m classified as neurodivergent, so there’s a certain structure I always look for when dealing with issues. Simply having that structure seemed to lead me to better solutions than that team otherwise would have. The neurotypical workers in those teams would focus on just completing the immediate task, while I would go through the whole thing from top to bottom, trying to understand the full scope of the issue, from a fundamental level. This often led to me catching issues that were otherwise unnoticed. It also resulted in me taking much longer to do simple tasks than others took; which is a big reason I don’t consider my approach to be “better”, just different. It could be argued either way which is “better”, and such an assessment is really a matter of opinion. The fact is, me doing their work often resulted in finding more issues, and taking longer. I got blamed for slow working, and they shot the messenger more than once for the problems found; so I get blamed for things a lot. I’m okay with it because I know it’s not my fault. As long as nobody yells at me, or threatens my job for what I’ve found, I’m going to keep doing it… but my interest in doing that work was to resolve the problems so I don’t need to deal with it again later; so I always try to do root cause analysis, or RCA. RCA is not a short process… sometimes it’s as simple as changing deborah to sally, or whatever, on a phone system, and resetting the voicemail password, then emailing that information off to the customer. Other times it’s that the user is assigned but to an offline or incorrect phone, or the phone is assigned as the wrong model in the system and it’s not picking up the changes because the configuration file is wrong for the phone type (or any number of other errors). Things happen.
Sorry for the mini-rant, I kinda got off topic there for a bit.