Working in the field of computers, you probably know how to fix a printer or scanner, or replace a drive and/or motherboard. You probably also know when people talk in abbreviations, such as ISP, VM and PR, or when people just ask you about new technologies, such as AWS, that you are just learning about. As an IT specialist, it is extremely important to keep yourself informed and organized since you never know when something will unexpectedly break or stop working, or when someone might ask for immediate help. 

Prioritizing & Documentation

Prioritizing is extremely helpful to determine what’s the most important task or issue. An important tool that helps us tackle tasks quickly is our documentation platform. We are encouraged to document as much as we can. Documentation makes our daily work much easier since an issue a specific user has might have been an issue someone else had in the past, and it was properly documented. For example, imaging a computer and installing specific software for each client becomes 50 percent easier when a document states what a specific user/client uses for their daily work. 

Helpdesk is Only Part of What We Do

From experience, I learned that many people outside the IT field do not really know what we normally do. Many times, users think IT specialists are looking at a helpdesk queue 24/7, waiting for something to break, a new problem or a question to come up so that we can start working; therefore, many people open tickets and expect an answer immediately. Unfortunately, the helpdesk is just one of the many tasks we must keep an eye on to prevent more severe problems.

Being in IT for more than five years and growing my way up at Rhythmic Technologies, from a junior IT technician to a senior IT specialist, I’ve learned that tasks pile up every time there is a new Zero-Day attack, vulnerability, OS update or even browser update – the latter happening almost daily nowadays. 

Two years ago, when I first started at Rhythmic, I would just have a few tasks per day and the helpdesk would be my priority, waiting for a ticket to come in so I could work on it and research the issue; however, I quickly learned the importance of keeping myself informed and always researching new issues and new technologies. Besides learning every day, IT specialists are always scanning the anti-malware portal for new alerts regarding viruses, spyware and spam detections. We always try to get those alerts resolved as soon as we become aware of them so users do not become compromised by any intruders or malicious code. 

Another important task that must be tracked is updates. Our Remote Monitoring and Management system (RMM) is pretty good at detecting and suggesting new updates for specific endpoints. However, software is not always perfect and might miss a scan due to a computer being offline or a user not allowing the RMM to install the new upgrades. Therefore, we must be actively looking for new releases to test them and then push them to our clients safely. Believe it or not, social media and many other websites, such as Twitter and Reddit, allow us to keep ourselves informed at all times because it could take anyone a few seconds to write about a new discovery they just made instead of publishing it in a newspaper or on NewsChannel. The online IT community is huge, and we take advantage of it by reading old and new posts that will help us in the future.

To sum up, just as technology changes every day, so do our daily tasks. Two days are never the same since we must be prepared for the unexpected and be ready to prevent any vulnerabilities or problems that might come up. Working with the amazing people at Rhythmic Technologies makes our daily tasks much easier since the team is always there to help with any questions or concerns.