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Good Afternoon
I’ve hired and helped get hired, many young IT Professionals just starting their careers. I also teach a couple classes. I’m reaching out to anyone in HR/Recruitment, Hiring Managers and really anyone who deals with entry level IT Professionals. This includes, Help Desk, Support Technicians as well as developers. If you want to toss in some soft skills that would be great but really I’m looking for technologies/technical skills you see as being deficient. Please do not turn this into a forum to rant. I’m trying to develop an extra-curricular program that kids coming out of tech schools and community colleges can complete to be more productive in their first jobs.
Thank you in advance

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Coming out of school I found nobody mentioned anything about production printers, granted they are easy to manage.

Customer service skills can never be over-emphasized.

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Honestly, I think every IT professional should go through technical support call center training of some kind the minute they start looking for a job. The soft skills you get from that kind of environment will lay the foundation for everything else to build upon. Things like the back-to-back Lego build (backs to each other, tell the other person how to build a given object, like playing the telephone game but with Legos), empathy training, Active Listening skills, and so on.

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  1. Customer service skills. I’ve dealt with way too many people in tier 1 call centers who are just complete jerks, and read many other stories from coworkers who have some legitimate complaints about their IT helpdesk people. Teaching budding IT pros how to successfully interact with both technical and non-technical individuals, as well as both users and bosses, is incredibly important and often a lacking skill.

  2. Google-fu. People who grew up being interested in technology already have their Google-fu down, but many people migrating to IT did not grow up around it. Teaching some tips and tricks for how to maximize relevent Google results would be great in a class.

  3. Troubleshooting 101. I wasn’t really sure how to label this one well, but I feel another lacking area is how to get enough information from the user to efficiently troubleshoot. It’s especially important when dealing with non-technical users who think that “Well I clicked the start button and now it doesn’t work” is helpful. I’ve come across a lot of new techs who don’t often know where to start when coming across an issue they’ve never encountered before.

  4. Best practices. I don’t know that this is a deficient skill, but it’s definitely good to pound it into techs’ heads early to save some headache down the road.

  5. Good note taking and technical documentation. I grouped these together since they’re pretty similar. Personal notes should be clear enough that they can follow them a year down the road after not having done the process since taking the notes. They should also be able to create documentation on technical processes that are readable by both techies and non-techies.

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I think one of the hardest things is approaching IT as a generic topic. There is no single entry point to the field. Soft skills are the only general things that apply across the board and by far are the most important. Communications and business empathy are the tops that I see lacking. And this goes for all levels of IT. Too many IT people can’t figure out how they fit into the business, what the business needs and how to communicate IT’s stance to and from the business itself.

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From a purely technical standpoint, too few IT newbies understand how to code and what software even is, dont understand troubleshooting concepts, don’t understand things like the OSI model and other architectural elements, can’t figure out risk, cost, and such. The things lacking are often conceptual more than anything.

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This is not a rant, but I have seen many Entry level IT people either quit the field or hate IT because of the following:

Soft skills and don’t take things personally. People will royally screw up their devices and it will somehow be all IT’s fault. Learn to be blamed and yelled at for things that were beyond your control. On the other hand, care about your end users and show them that you genuinely want to solve their problems. Just remember no matter how much you improve the system, someone will still complain about speed and “something” being slow or not working right. Don’t chase ghosts, verify if there is an actual problem

Learn to be calm and relax when problems occur. Follow a troubleshooting methodology

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Or, you know, work for a company that values honesty and its employees and would never let that fly. That’s unprofessional behaviour and not in the interest of the business. Good companies don’t let that stuff happen. And I’ve worked for a lot of companies like that, it’s not just an imaginary company.

Now if you work in IT consulting, there is little to be done. But i’ve fired clients for this as well.

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Sadly, IT is often a brutal field. A lot of people will need to be culled from it or they will end up unhappy in the long run.

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Customer Support Skills are a must. Too many times have I met other IT people who have no social skills whatsoever and can’t explain to their users what they did to fix the issue.

Programming: I wish I had continued doing my Java programming in college. Teach them to code something , I think Python or PHP would be perfect starters.

Respect goes without saying.

Server stuff ( really depends what is important to the client)

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Lots of IT will never have customers or clients, customer service skills are always nice, but most of IT will never use them. I wouldn’t make it a general requirement, people need to focus on the skills for their job, not always on a different job. Soft skills would not have helped me admin servers or write code, and focusing on them instead of on the skills I needed for my first job would have made it that much harder to get into IT.

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Thanks for all of the replies so far, I’d like to see a few more if anyone cares to chime in.

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Customer service skills will also teach how to professionally/properly communicate with colleagues or managers. I would say all of IT could benefit with customer service skills.

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I don’t agree. Customer service skills teach you how to placate and serve, not how to communicate as a peer, sell or convince. I know tons and tons of IT people with great customer service, almost none of them have the necessary skills to communicate with management and peers, especially in the ways that are needed for decision making. Customer service and business presentation skills are vastly different. Both are soft and involve communications, but one doesn’t teach the other and people with one skill often don’t have the other.

Being polite and helpful as a personality or skill often goes against the needs of being forceful and convincing.

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Actually, thinking of helpdesk as a common “filter” to IT careers may create many of the problems that we see in the higher parts of the industry - people who were great at customer service but don’t have the skills that are the opposite of those which are what are needed in other parts of the industry. It’s hard to make the transition from being subservient to the secretary and being everyone’s “helper” to being a peer with the CEO and being able to tell him when he’s being financially foolish.

I wonder if this “filter” mentality is causing many of our industry problems.

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A little while back our HR director took a few IT resumes and tore them up. Not literally tore them up, but formatted and edited them to get past the HR screen.

https://blog.cbtnuggets.com/2016/03/it-interview-tips-getting-past-the-hr-screen/

It’s a skill in itself to get past the HR screen.

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I think it’s a problem, as it seems the IT side tries to push everyone entering into IT into a help desk/service role. You don’t learn admin/engineer stuff in this role nor do you learn many of the business side of things you’ll need to know either. If you are interested in customer service roles, then help desk and support stuff should be the path. But I think it does a disservice for all the other type of IT roles (admin/engineer/analyst/etc) that have to start in a help desk role and take whatever strange path that might eventually lead to an admin/engineer role instead of having more direct paths and direct learning of those roles and the business processes that go with those roles.

You don’t see this weird path so much on the development side, as for most it’s basically you start as a junior dev and learn on the job from there. There is no push everyone into application support first and learn a bunch of stuff unrelated to development followed by having them try and work their way up from customer support type roles into a development job.

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You don’t see it in any other career, either. Product engineers don’t start doing customer service calls. Car mechanics don’t start their careers driving customers to and from appointments. Doctors don’t start their careers as receptionists. Pilots aren’t required to be flight stewards for years before being allowed to fly the plane.