Are you an IT technician wanting to get a promotion at the MSP company you work for? We can get you there! If you are just starting out in the industry as an IT technician and want to know how to climb the ladder, the basic things you need to understand are the following:
To level up in an MSP and be a great technician, you need to be consistent and reliable. Make sure to go the extra mile instead of robotically knocking down tasks. Pay great attention to writing detailed ticket notes as they are the record of what you’ve accomplished, and be a top contributor to documentation in general. Everyone will appreciate that. Be a team player as well and learn from senior techs while helping junior technicians improve their work. Help the management team by understanding their perspective and the work they put in to keep the help desk running, as well as fulfilling the unique needs of the clients. Put in the effort to understand the interaction between the technologies used, management, clients and your peers. And lastly, be a creative go-getter and team player!
If you’re ready to put these things into practice in your workplace, read this article further to get deeper insight on why and how to:
- Be consistent and reliable
- Go the extra mile
- Have great ticket notes
- Be a top contributor to documentation
- Be a team player
- Advance your skills learning from senior techs
- Contribute to helping junior techs
- Help the management by understanding their perspective
- Understand the interaction between the technology, management and the customer
- Be a goal-getter
Let’s dive into these objectives.
Be consistent and reliable–the cornerstone of improvement
The best thing that you can always do when doing any job is to show up and be a reliable team member. Never lose focus on what the key points of the job are.
The MSP that you work for ideally should have a well-defined structure where your role in the company and your tasks are presented clearly.
Even if they haven’t done that, make sure to be consistent in:
- Your performance on the job.
- The mood you have when interacting with customers.
- The quality of ticket notes you are writing.
Know that you will be a great employee when you can deliver consistently while others are arriving late to the job or forgetting to call a customer back. Your employers will know they can always rely on you.
Go the extra mile and get noticed for your contributions
A lot of people just want to do their job with the mindset of “I’ll just do what I have to until my shift is finished.” They essentially go through their tasks robotically throughout the day.
Consciously or unconsciously, they are just doing the bare minimum amount of work that they need to do in order to get by and receive their next paycheck. That is not really the attitude that somebody who aims to climb up the ranks should have.
What they should be doing instead is going the extra mile to make sure that the company is doing well and their clients are happy with their service.
Business demands from you that you constantly do better and it demands excellence by:
- always go above and beyond to help the client.
- going a little bit further to solve an issue.
- leaving better notes and documentation.
Always go the extra mile as it will pay you back in dividends!
Have great ticket notes to bring order to the helpdesk
Whether or not you are performing well will be judged by the quality of your ticket notes. These serve as a record track of what you’ve accomplished with that MSP.
If there are any complaints about you as a technician, it is important to log any details regarding communication with clients and steps you’ve taken so far to help solve the issue. If it’s then proven that you’ve done everything you could do to help them, the complaint can easily be disregarded.
This is why keeping detailed ticket notes with a status update and next steps clearly defined will save you a lot of trouble.
Good ticket notes will benefit your clients, fellow staff members and the MSP as a whole, making you a valuable team member.
Technical documentation and its importance in client success
Once an MSPs surpasses 5-10 technicians, documentation becomes the key to cutting down all the noise on the help desk. It helps automate proper escalation policies, as well as the upkeep of critical systems like ITGlue, or any password manager. Everything needs to be kept up to date.
The benefits of keeping excellent documentation is reflected most in two cases:
- When more than one technician is working on the same issue.
- The handling of team projects.
For example, if a client calls and says they’ve been working with John on an issue, but John is not in the office, it helps to have records of the work John has done. John’s documentation will save his co-workers a lot of time and effort in checking the progress of the issue. The client will also be happy to know that their case is handled with care and taken seriously, despite John’s absence.
It’s also important that individuals working on a team project make updates to documentation as soon as they make changes. Everything that an individual worked on should be written down in ticket notes in order to ensure clarity in the project. This will improve the productivity in the team you are working with and show that you are a reliable and organized contributor.
Be a team player – it’s not you vs. the world!
If you want to make your company more profitable and accumulate better and happier clients, you need to be willing to go out of your way to help team members do their job better.
There is no place in an MSP for a lone-wolf mentality. So offer your management feedback on the system, tell them what you and your team members like and what can be changed in the system to help you do better work. Trust us… They will appreciate it!
Another way to get noticed as a team player is to tailor your interactions with different team members based on how best you can collaborate with them. Here’s a list of MSP roles and how your collaborations could look like:
- Regard senior techs as mentors that you can sharpen your skills with.
- Help junior techs to improve their work and learn from you.
- Help management by understanding their role and what experiences you have to help them have a better bird’s eye view of what is going on.
- Understand the client’s position as well and empathize with their pain points better.
- Contribute to the unique interaction between the helpdesk, clients and technologies used as a bridge between the two.
We also advise getting to know better common softwares like ITGlue, Freshdesk, Sonicwall, etc. They are in a way like another trusty team member, and the better you work with them, the better the operations of the whole system.
Be a goal getter and don’t waste your talent!
There is a huge gap in the MSP space for talented people. With the proper mindset and following our advice, you can be the piece of the puzzle they’ve been missing.
At Support Adventure, we’ve provided remote staff for over 40 MSPs with our outsourced MSP staffing services. We’ve gotten to know them inside out from the management level to client interaction. We’ve acquired knowledge of all the best practices for a technician, so apply for a job with us and we will match you with a successful MSP that will be more than happy to have you as a part of their team.
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