5 Characteristics that IT Support Specialists Should Have
IT support is the type of job that requires a lot of knowledge and expertise on the subject. It’s important to really know what you are talking about otherwise you could completely ruin someone’s life. That’s not an exaggeration. If you give someone by IT consulting advice, they could lose everything on their computer, which very well could be their entire life including business or company transactions and foundations, financial statements, childhood sentiments, contact information and more. Of course, they should have backed it up but that’s something their IT support should have suggested in the beginning. Here are a few things that you should have or be when trying to get into the IT services industry.
Ability to Be Detail Oriented
In order to work well with computers and the support side of things you have to pay attention to details. It’s important in order to successfully complete the work properly and effectively. When someone calls for help with their technology, you need to be able to get to the root of what the problem is and figure it out as well as fix it and later document everything that happened and how you went about resolving the situation. If you rush through the work, you may miss important details that you needed in order to do the job right. Having the ability to pay attention the details will help to make sure that you do the job right the first time.
Ability to Communicate
The role of the IT department is to act as a mediator between the technology and the user. You have to be able to understand technology but you also need to understand people. If someone is doing something wrong, you can’t assume that they are less than you. You need to be able to listen and communicate with the user in order to figure out how to better educate them on how to use their piece of technology. This means being able to translate technical jargon into every day English or Layman’s terms. Once you can do this, you’ll be able to do your job better by being able to effectively communicate with the person using the technology as well as the technology itself.
Ability to Continue to Learn
Never be prideful enough to think that you have arrived. It’s important to always be learning. Technology is constantly advancing, constantly changing and getting better. You have to be able to keep up with those changes. If you can’t learn from people that are ahead of you or even from manuals, then you won’t be able to stay in IT support for very long. You will very soon be left behind and unable to understand the types of things that are going on around you. This also goes for learning from experience and mistakes. If this is your chosen profession, you will have to have a constant fow of new information flowing through your mind.
Ability to Be Independently Interested
Being independently interested refers to the technology itself. If you are only interested in getting the paycheck, but not the technology field itself, you won’t make a very good support specialist. By looking into things for yourself and bettering your own knowledge and craft, you’ll make a great employee. However, doing only the bare minimum to be able to help customers and users will end badly.
Ability to Think Logically As Well As Creatively
Being a so called ‘computer guy’ means that you are naturally a consistent and logical thinker. However, in order to be a well rounded support specialist, you’ll need to open up the opposite side of your midn as well which is the creative side.
There’s more to being in IT support than just knowing the computer lingo. You can speak geek all you want but if you aren’t able to communicate effectively or implement the things that you have learned into your work, then you won’t be able to stay in IT support for very long. However, if you can take the above tips and work them into your personality and practice them, then you’ll be able to get into any company that you want, provided you can give off a good first impression.no
