The job is difficult to acquire given the required Security+ certification and security clearance. It can take several weeks to several months to start working, and SAIC only pays for the week-long training period before the certification is completed. If one requires more time to study for the exam, it is unpaid.
Additionally, though the team you work with will be technically proficient, because it is a 100% remote job, many agents do the bare minimum to get by leaving other workers to pick up their slack.
A year and a half ago, this was a dream job. The desk was fully staffed with SAIC employees and a large number of subcontractors. The desk supported only CONUS active Army users. A little more than a year ago, however, all of those subcontractors were released for an undisclosed reason, reducing staffing by about a third. In the months since then, in addition to the users the desk was already supporting, the desk has added Army National Guard users, Army Reserves users, Pacific users, and users in Korea among others. This has caused desk agents to be overwhelmed by calls on an average day, and major incidents to be unmanageable. As a result of this, many users have lost faith in the desk causing them to become intolerant of any wait time required to resolve issues. Many of them to look for ways to bypass the desk entirely. Management is not responsive to the situation and continues to add supported users without adding new agents. As a result, the desk continuously loses responsible agents while retaining agents who do not care about the quality of their work, putting ever more strain on the remaining responsible agents. Personally speaking, the number of calls and tickets I would work on an average day would leave my voice hoarse and my hands aching.
I expect SAIC to lose the Army Enterprise Service Desk contract in the future.
