Where do I even begin. Depending on the how well your direct superior (the Knowledge Manager, KM) knows the duties performed by your position, your job can either be a standard 9-5 or a living nightmare of putting out fires as they come up, only to realize the whole shop is burning down around you. When you first start, you might be lucky in having the person leaving show you the ropes, and that's great; I personally got to shadow my predecessor for almost a month before I formally started. But more often than not, you will be thrown into this position with little to no guidance, crashing spectacularly into the ground when you're expecting to hit it running. Most of the training material that is available to you is severely outdated, with some resources dating back a decade, and oftentimes the information that you do end up finding conflicts with one another. The Home Office must understand this, because in the time that I worked this position (a little under 2 years), I had to train a little under 10 people for this position; 4 of whom came from the same location, each replacing the person that came before. Your main responsibility is to source all parts that the technicians need at your service location to complete their repairs for customers. Now this may seem like a non-issue, until you realize that you are also expected to pick up managerial duties on top of the work that you are expected to do. And you are expected to do a lot. So unless your KM is able to perform even a fraction of the duties that you are expected to perform, you can kiss having any reasonable vacation time off goodbye since you will always be needed on the job. The technicians of the shop will also most definitely call you on your off hours and even days, looking for solutions to problems that they themselves have created more often than not. These two factors at my location made it so that the longest period of time off that I had ever received was 4 days, and that was including my normal weekend. The Home Office in Hilliard, OH is also so detached from the reality of the day-to-day duties of the Parts Coordinator that they expect you to be able to perform all of your position's duties in 20 hours a week. For a full time position. This way, they don't feel as bad when they start unloading additional work onto you. And they unload a lot of work on to you consistently, from new procedures to assigning responsibility of customer facing merchandise that is on the sales floor, even though you're not a Sales Representative. At least in other positions in this company you can expect some backup from people with the same job to split up the work; the only other people that are working the same job as you are scattered across the continent and are dealing with the same issues that you are with no backup other than thoughts and prayers. What, you thought that the KM would be able to assist you? They're too busy running the floor and giving customers thank you's for shopping at Micro Center to be bothered to help you out. Have the technicians help you out? Half the time they don't even respect the KM, why would they bother helping you out when you're not even a manager? Oh wait but you are, with the same responsibilities expected out of other managers without the pay.
