IT Support: What Expertise Do You Need?

By:Joshua Feinberg

When it comes to small business IT support, expertise is relative and exists at all different levels. In this article, you'll learn more about expertise within your IT support business and what other skills are desirable for you and your employees.

You'll find experts at every level of IT support

In a big-enterprise IT organization for example, you find everyone from level one help desk technicians up to senior systems engineers, all the way up to the CIO. Of course, you'll find a lot of gradations and a lot of variations in between those levels. Ideally, each will be an expert in their own specialty.

The same will usually be true among your IT support contractors and staff. More than likely, you have some technicians who can handle real simple things like a hard drive installation or a LAN adapter installation. You probably have some people on staff who can handle installing a simple peer-to-peer network or maybe a basic dedicated server. Then perhaps you have someone on staff who works with server-class firewalls and setting up VPNs and other more intricate, advanced networking technologies.

Don't Forget People Skills

Most of the people that are successful in IT support for small businesses are either really strong on the technical side or really strong on the sales side. Consultants who are phenomenal on the sales side and phenomenal on the technical side are a rare commodity in IT support.

The best technicians and systems engineers, however, also have good people skills that come into play during a big project, for example, when installing a 10- or a 25-node network. In a situation where there are vendor products and solutions from many different vendors, a tremendous amount can go wrong. So, project management, administrative management, and account management skills are all important in IT support.

The Bottom Line about IT support

In this article, you've been introduced to the successful traits in consultants providing IT support.

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