Capturing questions for your senior

Self-paced training mostly happens in the gaps between live work, often when the seniors you’d want to ask are on calls or asleep. Two failure modes show up over and over. The first is freezing: the tech hits a confusing passage, has no one to ask, and stalls for a day. The second is silent skipping: the tech glosses over the bit they didn’t understand and moves on, which works fine until that bit shows up on a real ticket three weeks later.

A running questions list fixes both. It unblocks you in the moment (write it down, move on) and it stockpiles questions for a check-in when a senior has time.

The shape of an entry

A plain text file, a sticky note, a channel-to-self in chat, a page in your notes app. Pick whatever you’ll actually use. Format matters less than habit. Three fields per entry:

• Where. The lesson, the ticket, or the page you were on.
• What you didn’t get. In your own words, not a quote. Quoting the lesson is a sign you skipped past without engaging.
• What you tried. The search, the doc you read, the colleague you asked. If you didn’t try anything, write that too.

Three lines is plenty. You’re flagging your future self, not writing a ticket.

The “what you tried” line

The line that pulls the most weight is “what you tried.” It does three things at once.

It stops you from filing trivial questions a quick search would have answered. The act of writing “tried: nothing” makes the next step obvious.

It gives the senior context they need. A question that arrives as what is auto-isolation? gets a one-line answer. The same question with tried: I read 4.4, I think I get host isolation but I can’t tell if auto-isolation is the same thing differently named or a separate feature gets a real conversation.

It builds the habit of trying before asking. That habit is what a senior will reward you for the rest of your career. Seniors run out of patience for techs who treat them as a search engine. They go out of their way for techs who arrive with a real attempt attached.

When to ask now, and when to save it

Some questions cannot wait. If a real ticket is in front of you and you’re stuck, that’s a live block, you reach for the on-call senior. Most training questions are not that. The default is capture, keep moving, bring the list to a scheduled check-in (weekly works for most MSPs).

A useful rule of thumb that comes back later in the course: if I do the next thing and it’s wrong, is it reversible? If yes, you can keep moving and capture the question. If no, you stop, and that question moves to “now.”

What to do this week

Pick the surface today (file, note, chat-to-self) and put a stake in the ground: this is where questions live for the duration of the course. Tell your senior the surface exists and ask how they’d like the check-in to run. Some prefer a shared doc you both add to during the week; some prefer you bring the list in fresh each time. Don’t agonise over the format. Use it.

The pattern carries past training. Live work generates the same shape of question, often under more pressure. A tech who already runs a list is the tech who walks into the first month of live tickets without spinning.