Reddit mentions of The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired: (Performance-based Hiring Series)

Maybe not so many employers really invest in their people, but guess what? You have your personal lessons available every day no matter what your employer says.
Daily commuting to and from work? Smoke breaks, lunches? Waiting during lengthy installations/scans? Don't know what to do in some afternoons during your free time?

• Read books! Listen to podcasts!
  
• Go through case studies!
  
• Volunteer in small projects nobody else wants to work on!
  
  There is never enough time to learn everything that you can sell later on.
  
  Please note that I work currently as team lead so my view might be biased, however if you are more a people person, enjoy making people around you happy and not everything is just about "you", team lead can be very rewarding for you personally and career-wise. Why?
  
  Forget about micromanaging people, monitoring their numbers and telling them what to do. This-does-not-work. This is not a job for a team leader. Team leader LEADS and might have a supervisor to do some of the necessary evils so he can focus on finding a way how to motivate his support team to its maximum potential. To find the right career path for them so they will have a chance to grow, but still have the desire to stay.
  
  You will learn about how actually people cooperate at their best, what motivates them, what are their strengths and how you can leverage them to make them shine. This will help you to be a better team member/leader because only technical knowledge is not enough. For a senior support people maybe, team lead needs even more than that.
  
  You need soft skills. Do you know how to listen? I mean REALLY listen and not just wait until the other one shuts up so you can finally share your idea? Do you know how to deliver positive and corrective feedback? How to get your message across? How to teach with questions instead of telling? How is your time & stress management?
  
  In the long run you can also earn about incident & problem management, you will be finding bottlenecks of your support, having opportunity to talk to stakeholders and building up your network that might eventually (among other things) help you do your job better. And to move on to become manager. Maybe :)
  
  
  Ah! At last! Some real links and not just blabbering :D
  
  
• Having trouble to learn on super fast pace and still remember everything?
  Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Principles-Surviving-Thriving/dp/0979777720
  
  
• Feeling that knowledge of MBA would be helpful for moving from the team lead role in some time? No problem!
  http://www.mysliderule.com/learning-paths/mba
  
  
• Need some leadership skills? BAM!
  http://www.mindtools.com
  
  
• Not feeling so comfortable while speaking in front of more people? Or are you boring as a speaker? :)
  https://www.coursera.org/course/publicspeak
  
  
• Already want to leave your current company and get the job you deserve?
  Practise this: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Guide-Hiring-Getting-Hired-ebook/dp/B00B9JZMKE
  
  What I have described might not be for you. And that's ok. But think about this and think about this hard, create a mind map about your career path if you need to, but make sure that every single step you take from now on is forward, not backward anymore: http://youtu.be/uyaJ8eR9tzw?t=2s ;)
  
  Source: Thousands of incidents on help desk, hundreds of hours spent on developing other tech support specialists, tens of people interviewed for various positions in less than 2 years.