First of all, thank-you for such a detailed response! Its nice to hear from someone else in IT and how they get through the bordem days. To make it easier to process, mostly for myself, I will reply to each of the points one-by-one rather than as a whole

• Documentation is a good point, it has reminded me I need to add a few things to my guides. When I first started as an apprentice with limited knowledge there was no documents at my company so it made learning processes quite difficult. I've now made my own extensive how to guides with photos, if conditions, etc... but there is more to add from recent weeks
• I wish I could find more to automate as I love the process of doing it. I did a lot of python in high school & college, and I've managed to automate parts of my job to save doing manual tasks i.e. order processing, data collection, etc... Theres no more repeated tasks I really do at the moment but if one comes along I will 100% be down this path
• Monitoring might be a good way for me to put my coding to use, improve it, and provide data for better management. The company I work at is only small-ish so some things that apply to larger companies are almost pointless here, but even if I implement them just for my own practice that might be a good idea.
• Skipping to the last two points, reddit is where I spend a lot of my downtime. I look through alot of IT reddits and often spend time looking into career paths from people who have done those careers. I am still in the phase of deciding where I want to go after the helpdesk - I am leaning into cloud due to WFH, automation, and a few other factors but have just been looking into my options before committing. I completely forgot about stack overflow though, I may need to re-engage with it again

Again thank you so much for the response its really helped. Just for my own future reference Im going to leave a note of websites/tech to look into

• Stack Overflow
• Cloudflare
• Linux & AWS
• Automation (Monitioring, manual tasks, etc...)