Expertise with IT support comes in many levels.  What expertise does your IT support business need, and what skills do both you and your employees need to succeed?

Experts at Every Level

You will find experts at all different levels of IT support.  For example, in a big-enterprise IT company, you will find help desk technicians alongside senior systems managers and the CIO.  You will find a lot of different levels in between, but ideally each will be an expert within his/her own specialty.  

Your IT support contractors will also be different.  You will have some technicians that can deal with simple tasks like hard drive installation or a LAN adapter installation.  You will also have some people that can install simple P2P networks or dedicated servers.  You might also have an expert able to work with server-class firewalls or able to set up VPNs and other sophisticated technologies.  

People Skills are Critical

The most successful people in IT support are strong technically or strong in their skills working with people and selling.  Consultants great at both aspects are pretty rare.  

However, the best technicians and systems engineers have great people skills that will help them during a big project, such as installing a 10 – 25-node network.  When vendor products from many different companies are involved, a lot can go wrong.  Project management, therefore along with administrative management and account management skills are critical components of IT support.

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit