From Attaché to ICT Officer: The 3 Years Nobody Saw

On a CV, my early years look neat. ICT Support Attaché at RAI Plywoods. ICT Support Engineer Tier 1. ICT Assistant at Hand in Hand Eastern Africa. ICT Officer, promoted. Clean progression, tidy dates, a story arc any recruiter can follow in thirty seconds.

That is not what those three years looked like. This is the version the CV doesn't show — the one that actually matters if you're trying to climb the same ladder.

The Attaché Year — RAI Plywoods

I arrived at RAI Plywoods as an ICT Support Attaché, which in practice meant: do whatever the senior engineer didn't want to do. Printer jams. Cable tracing. Rebuilding workstations nobody had touched in two years because they "still worked." Running backups to DAT tapes.

The glamorous stuff was not going to find me. So I made a decision that sounds obvious in hindsight and wasn't obvious at the time: I was going to know more about this network than the person who hired me.

Practical things I did in that first year:

• Documented every device on the floor in a spreadsheet — 200+ staff machines, network equipment, printers, servers — with location, OS, last service date
• Wrote runbooks for the five issues that came up most often (password resets, email on new devices, shared-drive mapping, VPN setup, printer recovery)
• Started shadowing the senior engineer on every problem I didn't understand and asking him to narrate what he was doing
• Kept a daily log of every ticket I touched — cause, fix, time taken

None of that was in my job description. None of it got me paid more that year. All of it mattered.

The Conversation That Got Me Promoted

After ten months, the senior engineer was leaving. Management started interviewing for a replacement.

I asked for a meeting with the ICT manager. I brought the spreadsheet, the runbooks, the ticket log. I didn't ask for the senior role — I asked whether I could be considered for Tier 1, and whether I could demonstrate the scope I'd already been quietly covering. I said I understood I was young and new, and I was asking for a chance to earn it, not for a favour.

They promoted me to ICT Support Engineer Tier 1 the following week.

Promotions don't usually go to the person who did the most work. They go to the person who did the work and made the work visible at the right moment. I did not know this at 22. I do now.

The Jump to Hand in Hand Eastern Africa

RAI Plywoods was a plywood manufacturer. I wanted to work somewhere the IT mattered more. When I saw a job listing for ICT Assistant at Hand in Hand Eastern Africa — a multinational NGO with 30+ branches — I applied the next morning.

The interview was a trap I walked into confidently. They asked about Active Directory. I'd never touched AD. We used local accounts at RAI. I said so. Then I said: "I learn infrastructure fast because I treat documentation as the product. If you hire me, I will be functional in AD within two weeks, and I will leave you with runbooks the next person can pick up."

I got the job. Whether because of the answer or in spite of it, I still don't fully know.

The 18 Months Between ICT Assistant and ICT Officer

This is the stretch nobody sees on the CV, and it's the most formative.

As ICT Assistant, my scope was meant to be local — the Nairobi head office, some remote support to branches when tickets came in. I decided to go further. Not through heroics, through deliberate exposure:

• I attended every branch visit I could, even when they weren't mine to attend. I'd ride along, take notes, and write up the branch's IT posture afterwards for my manager. Within nine months I'd been to most of them.
• I learned what wasn't being done — a specific gap around group policy, endpoint backups, and security hardening that no one owned. I proposed a rollout plan for it.
• I built relationships across the organisation — finance, M&E, HR, programmes. Every team that used IT had someone in it who would text me directly when things broke. I learned their workflows better than I learned the org chart.
• I kept my runbook habit. Every ticket I resolved went into a shared folder. When someone else needed the same answer, they found it without calling me.

When the ICT Officer role opened up — the person above me moved internally — my manager didn't need to think twice. I had already been doing the job for months, visibly, in a way that made the promotion feel like a formality rather than a decision.

Five Things I'd Undo If I Could

I wouldn't rewrite the whole path. But there are specific things I'd tell 23-year-old me to stop doing:

1. Stop saying yes to everything. The year I was most burned out was the year I couldn't say no to a single request. It made me less useful on the things that mattered. A full calendar is not the same as a productive one.
2. Start writing publicly sooner. I waited years to post anything about my work. The LinkedIn posts and blog entries I've put out in the last 18 months have done more for my career than the first five years of internal wins combined. Compounding doesn't start until you start.
3. Ask for pay reviews with data, not with feelings. My first two pay conversations were awkward because I had no specific numbers to point to. The third one went differently — I brought ticket volumes, downtime reductions, project outcomes. Data makes pay conversations less personal and more mechanical.
4. Stop treating senior people as oracles. I spent too long assuming senior engineers had a complete picture. Most of them were making it up, same as me, just with more calibrated guesses. Treat their opinions as inputs, not verdicts.
5. Don't conflate length of service with growth. There's a version of me that would have stayed at Hand in Hand for another four years because it was comfortable. Growth and comfort are rarely in the same room.

What the Titles Don't Show

The cleanest way I can summarise three years of climbing is this: titles are the labels the market uses to price you. The work is what makes the title real.

Most of my promotions didn't feel like promotions when they happened. They felt like someone finally naming the scope I'd been quietly covering for months. The title arrived late. The work had already happened.

If you're an attaché, assistant, intern, or junior anything right now and reading this — the three years between where you are and where you want to be are already happening. The only question is whether you're treating them as waiting time or as the actual path.

Keep Going

If you're walking this ladder and want to compare notes, reach out. I remember how lonely the attaché year felt, and I'd have appreciated someone two steps ahead telling me what was on the other side of it.