What IT Skills should there be on an Support Help Desk?

In this video in our IT support series, Chris talks about what type of engineers you should find on a helpdesk, as well as what the spread between the team as a whole should be of these various levels of IT skills. Watch the video or read the transcript below, then if you’re interested in our IT Support service – our contacts details are at the bottom.

When you’re outsourcing your IT support function to a local IT partner, what are the skills you would expect them to have on their helpdesk service? Definitely they will have some quick fixes there, these are the first line engineers. And typically you want as few of those as possible, they’re the guys that would do resets of passwords and fixes within, perhaps, 15 to 30 minutes – which actually amounts to about 50 to 60 per cent of your cases.

The next, and the most amount of engineers that you need, are second line engineers. Those are desktop engineers that understand the Windows, the Mac environment, they understand Microsoft Office, they can fix anything on that desktop for your user. Typically these are engineers that would have between 2 and 5 years experience and that should make up the broader amount of engineers on the helpdesk service.

And then the final part are third line engineers. Third line engineers are really the heavyweight engineers, they’ve been around the block a bit, they’ve probably got a lot of certifications in Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, the Windows Desktop, they’re excellent with security. These are the guys and girls that would get handed the cases for about 20 per cent of the time and those cases actually take a little bit more investigation. It takes time to fix those and probably most of those cases span more than 24 hours.

So what you’re looking for is a spread of engineers but that 80 per cent, the bulk of the engineers are second line desktop type engineers that have 2 to 5 years experience.