You’ve seen different aspects of an IT technician’s role: setting up equipment on the organization’s network, maintaining the equipment to ensure it’s working, helping users, operating servers, and managing the IT assets.
Now you can focus on improving and developing the IT systems.
Represent the Users’ Perspective
As an IT technician, you’re the first point of contact for users. As a result, you understand their needs and daily problems more than anyone else.
Through constant contact, you will become aware of the hardware, software, and services that cause many issues.
You’ll identify the most frequent issues and let your superiors know. You could even come up with ideas for potential improvements that would reduce the problems.
By analyzing user requirements and monitoring technological developments, you’ll be able to suggest solutions that will make their lives easier.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
You can develop automation solutions to save on time spent performing administrative tasks and managing the IT systems. Automating involves replacing tedious and repetitive tasks previously done manually with a system solution. Let’s look at a few tools: scripting and task scheduling.
Understand Scripting
Scripting is an excellent way of automating simple tasks that must be done repeatedly and take a lot of time.
Okay, great, but what is it?
Scripting involves writing small programs called scripts that will carry out one or more specific actions.
Am I writing programs? But I don't know how to do that!
Don’t worry! As an IT technician, you’ll only be required to write mini-programs, and the IT community is brimming with ready-made scripts that you can use!
To improve your work, you can create small, simple scripts that will perform tasks such as archiving files, creating user accounts, sharing folders, managing permissions, sending emails, etc.
The possibilities are endless when using scripting — once you get a taste for it, you won’t want to go back!
Task Scheduling
Another useful tip is to combine your scripts with a task scheduling application so that the scripts will be executed automatically on a day and time of your choosing.
You might decide that user workstations must be shut down every midnight.
You might also schedule a data backup when a machine shuts down, launch an application when you log in, carry out various checks on an hourly basis, or perform a weekly server reboot.
Once again, the possibilities are endless, and it all depends on your needs.
Task automation will be really helpful for improving your organization’s IT systems and will also save you a massive amount of time.
Recommend Compatible Products
When upgrading parts of an IT system, you should advise and get involved with purchasing hardware and software.
You are ideally placed to identify user requirements, so you can use this knowledge to highlight different configuration types.
Sales staff need laptops with Wi-Fi and 4G capability when they're on the road; the administrative staff needs 24-inch-wide screens; architects need powerful machines to run resource-heavy applications, etc.
Your knowledge of these different configuration types will allow you to advise on which products to purchase.
Let's Recap!
When working on IT system improvement initiatives, the IT technician will:
Inform supervisors on what users need.
Suggest simple optimization solutions.
Advise on purchasing standard, compatible equipment, and applications.
That’s it for this part of the course on the activities of an IT technician. Now you have everything you need to get started!
Let’s test your new knowledge with a quiz before looking at advice for job interviews and career development.
