Whats the top 4 skill a Helpdesk technician should have?

faintingheart

What are the top skills a Helpdesk technician should have on their resume?

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jamesleecoleman

-Communication skills & customer service skills
-Research

I could only come up with two because these are the only two I could really think of. Shoot... communication skills got me in trouble with someone last week.

PC509

Troubleshooting is huge. What do you search for? How do you find the root cause? What order do you diagnose an issue (network issue, you don't start by rebooting the router!)?

Windows/Linux/MacOS (depending on environment) skills. Might as well know the basics of the OS.
Networking. Everything is networked these days. Be able to diagnose network issues, even if you can't fix them. You can get the right information to the right people.

Communication is huge, along with customer service. Both with end users and other support folks.

faintingheart

PC509: Does the company that hire people, train the new employee for this stuff? How do you just know how to do these stuff?

ElGato127

Big bladder - not many chances to get up during the day
Lots of patience - there are some dumb people out there

LOL

faintingheart

How about drink very little water. So no need to go to bathroom.

snokerpoker

Communication and basic troubleshooting. I can't tell you how many calls I get from the helpdesk where they simply report the issue without doing any troubleshooting at all.

scaredoftests

Patience, compassion for the end-user, troubleshooting skills and a sense of humor.

Phalanx

1. Customer service ability (compassion, understanding, patience, etc).
2. Excellent written and verbal language (if you can't explain a situation to someone without using technical terms, you're in trouble).
3. A level head for troubleshooting and process.
4. A good general knowledge of IT (in the most common, broadest sense).

faintingheart

Okay that's awesome you guys thanks for the list. Now how can I obtain these skills?

Phalanx

1. Comes with life. Be patient and understand the customer's position. Don't ever assume that you know more than them or that what they are telling you is not worth the time.
2. Practice. Spend time at home speaking to your family, and when they have a problem, treat it like an incident. It sounds stupid, but it does work, and allows you to see an honest opinion when they start frowning or laughing at things you say (let them know you're doing this before you start!). The writing side is practice, also.
3. This comes with experience and training. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

The more you do, the more you'll know to troubleshoot with. Learn everything you can get your hands on, even the small things you never considered.
4. The basic certifications can cover a lot of things, but applying that information to problems is where it becomes Knowledge, and then moves on to Wisdom. Look up the DIKW cycle and you'll understand.

Knowing things doesn't mean you're done.

faintingheart

Thanks Phalanx.

Phalanx

faintingheart wrote: »

Thanks Phalanx.

It's the one area I know I've become very good at. I've only just recently moved from 1/2nd line support into Technical Consultant, but I spent almost a decade working both those roles to a greater or lesser extent. My last boss actually cried when I left as she couldn't see anyone else being able to mentor her team members, so I must have done something right.

She has some great people though that I helped up to a great level, so I feel confident I moved on and left a mark.

tmtex

Not so much on the resume, but learn how to use google (quit coming to me). The helpdesk guys at my place are a bunch of rocks. If the user has X123 error or problem look it up. Google can be your best friend and quick. Another tool is Youtube

Fadakartel

tmtex wrote: »

Not so much on the resume, but learn how to use google (quit coming to me). The helpdesk guys at my place are a bunch of rocks. If the user has X123 error or problem look it up. Google can be your best friend and quick. Another tool is Youtube

That may be nice an all but certain environments the stuff they use aren`t on youtube or google.

Let`s look at it like this i`m a residential customer I call helpdesk they go through the typical stuff (restart modem) after that they are clueless and they also have 500 calls in the call centre queue, they would escalate to a NOC, from there on out the NOC would escalate depending if they can fix the issue or not.

Typical stuff then again i`m in a ISP for 14M mobile/broadband and other ISP customers so my environment would be very different.

The most skill a customer service rep can have is patience and be able to control your emotions as well as be able to communicate effectively (imagine your in comcast and a residential customer is giving you a good dose of verbal abuse)

DatabaseHead

Patience
Organizational Skills
Empathy
Listening Skills

stryder144

1. Know how to write stuff down and create "**** sheets". I worked with someone who rarely did so (I even gave him copies of what I had) and he landed in trouble a few times unnecessarily. This is great practice for...wait for it...documentation! Oh, yeah, and use Word with Grammarly loaded in. Seriously, use it, plus the builtin spell checker, and learn from your mistakes. There is nothing that dooms you quite so quickly as easily avoided grammatical errors.

2. How to talk to people. Verbal/oral communications skills are way too underdeveloped in this world. Take a public speaking course, join Toast Masters International. Volunteer to present things at meetings. Simple ways to differentiate yourself.

3. Compassion mixed with a passion to serve. Our customers tend to be very, very frustrated with the technology. Not to mention, they hate to admit that they are embarrassed that they can't figure out what the problem is. So, often enough, they take it out on you. Be compassionate..."stupid people" don't know what they don't know and aren't typically interested in learning. If you don't have a passion to serve the vast majority of people who are technically less capable than we are, you will burn out. Quickly.

4. A technical curiosity with a will to master said technology. If you master it, you will build your confidence. That confidence will shine through when you are able to simply describe the problem and solution in such a way that your client learns, even if s/he doesn't want to. It will become effortless and people will call on you by name. Be careful, though, because it becomes way too easy to make yourself indispensable to the point that you can't get anything else done, your coworkers just give you everything while they watch Youtube videos, or your boss overlooks you for a promotion because he "can't lose the best technician he has".

Those are my four. My advice, as far as how to develop those areas further, is to find someone who already possesses them and watch what they do, ask questions (write it down!), and put what you learned into practice. Success leaves clues, people. Stop reinventing the wheel when it comes to this topic and you will get to where you want to go that much faster.