How to Prepare for a Technical Support Job Interview: Tips and Tricks

As you embark on your journey to land your dream technical job, it is important to note that technical interviews can be a bit tricky to navigate. However, with proper preparation and an understanding of the skills required for the job, you can ace any technical interview. In this article, we will outline how to prepare for a technical job interview and provide you with some tips to help you excel.

The Benefits of a Career in Technical Support

Technical support job may not be the first choice that comes to mind when anyone considers getting into the tech industry, but it is a great career option. Here we are making a case for technical support jobs and why it is the perfect entry to the tech industry. If you are interested in starting your career in tech, you’re at the right place.

Small Wins Lead to Big Success

The journey to success is never easy, but it’s important to celebrate the little successes throughout this journey. These small successes, when added together, can lead to significant achievements over time. This was certainly true for me as a fresh-faced college graduate in the engineering field. When I started I was not even sure where to fitin, but small successes over time helped me carve a successful career journey

10 Must Have Soft Skills for A Techie

For building a career in tech you definitely need to have strong technical skills, but equally (if not more) soft skills are important deciding factor for your selection in your dream tech job. In order to increase your chances of selection and a successful career, you need to equip your self with these soft skills. Here we look at the top ten soft skills you must posses for a thriving career as a techie.

Default Network Ports for Common Services

Today all computers are interconnected and have to communicate with each other over a network. before passing this information these systems first establish a connection each end of which is a socket, A port is a logical address that is assigned to a specific service on the computer, and along with the IP address, it creates this socket, In this article, we understand more about ports and the common default or well-known ports used by services.

Why should organizations implement continuous career development plans.

Continuous career development plans are crucial for the success of an organization. Despite having robust recruitment and onboarding processes, many organizations overlook talent management or limit it to one-time training during induction. This approach leaves individuals to handle skill management within their teams, which can be challenging.

In recent years, the way people work has undergone a significant transformation. The employee lifecycle has shortened, leading to frequent changes in skillsets and skill levels within teams.

While organizations do implement employee training and development plans, these efforts often involve self-learning, sporadic classroom training, or sending employees to external programs. While these initiatives may provide some value, they fail to address the underlying issue, especially when organizations has to regularly hire new employees. As per Gartner Just 25% of Employees Are Confident About Their Career at Their Current Organization

Importance of continuous career development

In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing workplace, it is more important than ever for employees to be able to continuously develop their skills and knowledge. This is true for both new employees and those who have been with an organization for many years.

When a new employee joins an organization, they are unlikely to have all of the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in their role. They will need hands-on experience to fully understand the work and the skills required.

Providing all necessary skills upfront is not the best approach, as it would take a lot of time and the retention rate would be low. Employees need to put the concepts into practice to truly learn. Additionally, as the complexity of skills increases, initial training will not be enough to develop the skills required at that level.

This is why it is important for organizations to have a continuous career development strategy in place. This strategy should help employees identify their skills gaps and develop the skills they need to succeed in their current role and beyond.

Benefits to continuous career development

There are many benefits to implementing continuous career development plans. These benefits include:

  • Increased employee engagement and satisfaction: Employees who feel like they are constantly learning and growing are more likely to be engaged and satisfied with their work.
  • Improved employee performance: Employees with the right skills and knowledge are more likely to perform at their best.
  • Reduced employee turnover: Employees who are happy with their career development opportunities are less likely to leave their jobs.
  • Increased organizational agility: Organizations with a culture of continuous learning are better able to adapt to change.
  • Enhanced competitive advantage: Organizations that invest in their employees’ career development have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.

If you are looking for ways to improve your organization’s performance, then you should consider implementing continuous career development plans. These plans can help you attract and retain top talent, improve employee performance, and boost the bottom line. Lets take a look at key aspects for implementing continuous career development / career progression plans in an organization

Competency Matrix

The best strategy is to divide the entire competency matrix in shorter skills and skill levels and map them with the experience employee has in the organization, and then have a learning calendar for the employees on weekly monthly and quarterly basis, with its direct linkage to appraisals

This process can be further made effective if the work assigned during this time to the employees maps directly to the skills acquired so far

External Mentoring

In the fast-paced landscape of new organizations and ventures, the competition for top talent is intense. As the demand for perfectly aligned resources exceeds the supply, relying solely on such talent is not feasible for sustained organizational growth. Continuous Career Development plans can mitigate these challenges, but needs trainers and mentors, involving only key resources within the organization can consume a lot of their valuable time. External mentors, individuals who have hands-on experience in building teams and possess deep insights into training, skill development, and people management, bring valuable expertise and can help accelerates the process, expediting the organization’s overall growth.

Our Experience

In my last organization, we started a similar career progression plan, once we realized the cycle of new resources is going to stay, and we need a way to structurally bring the people to expected levels of performance. We did face several challenges, most importantly that time required for continuous trainings and its impact on both trainers and trainees, grabbing the mind share and making people believe in the approach, monitoring and reviews to have a smooth process, but finally we were able to put in place the process which was then considered a norm.

Implementing Continuous Career Development Plan

Pre-requisites

For any organization planning on implementing such programs, following have to be in place to make the program successful

  • Skill Management Body / Committee to oversee the entire implementation and execution of the program, It should include
  • A sponsor from senior management accountable for the program.
  • A senior HR personnel handhold the entire administration, calendar, scheduling, and assessments.
  • Include the key team members as a part of this body/committee.
  • We can use an LMS for the automation of a considerable number of activities, but not having an LMS should not be a blocker to start.
  • Prepare a bench of trainers, within the teams, so there is no dependency on one person.
  • Have a train-the-trainer program so all the trainers deliver the training as per norms and expected standards.
  • Integrate training assessment scores and training coverage with quarterly performance discussions
  • Line managers should be accountable for the participation of team members.
  • There should be a feedback system for all trainers, content, and trainees and the feedback loop should be closed by incorporating the feedback on a continuous basis.
  • Set benchmarks for individual trainers, candidates, administrators, line managers, and so on.

Add ons

  • Systems should be designed so the work done on the job can be associated with the training covered to assess the effectiveness of training.
  • Positive reinforcements if possible should be introduced for all the parties to achieve better success.

Skill Progression Matrix

  • Decide the duration the program would be run for any individual for a given role
  • Break the duration in to, Quarter –> Month –> Week
  • Decides the Topics / Subjects, these should include any soft skills and functionals skill other than the core job skills.
  • Distribute the overall skillset into skill levels.
  • Map Skill Levels to be covered each week to come up with skill progression matrix

Training Content Preparation

  • Prepare training content, and material even if it is outsourced or from existing materials.
  • Roll out the training calendar
  • Ask line managers to nominate candidates as per the training calendar
  • Conduct the trainings/assessments and publish scores on intranets or LMS
  • Training can be delivered manually or through recorded videos, but assessments have to be practical.
  • Review the progress weekly and discuss the feedbacks received.
  • Share the feedback with resources not achieving the benchmarks

For employee development to be effective, the work environment must prioritize continuous learning. Organizations should establish a culture of constant development and create programs that offer relevant training throughout an employee’s journey. This helps overcome current challenges and ensures a skilled talent pool to support organizational growth. These programs have a positive ripple effect, boosting confidence among senior team members and managers, increasing job satisfaction, addressing personal aspirations, improving engagement and retention, and ultimately driving better business results. The benefits of training and development cascade, leading to competent leaders, motivated employees, and increased profitability for the organization.

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Author
Nikhil Kumar Ahluwalia
Founder Upspir

Nikhil has over 16years of experience in the industry, before starting UPSPIR he was heading the support, services, and delivery function at Ameyo/Exotel as vice-president, and he has vast experience in managing and leading technical support and delivery teams, With Upspir he aims to take his passion of developing and mentoring people to next level by sharing his experiences and learning with those who want to build their career in the tech support domain

Learning on the job / Learnability

How you learn while working makes a lot of difference in your journey towards building a great career in tech. Even if we assume you got the right education in your school or college but it will never be possible that you acquire all the skills during your education.

As you grow in your career you have to continuously become proficient in what you already know and also learn new skills. Further, tech jobs come in all different shapes and sizes, even the same role with the same KRA in two organizations will require a different skill set to succeed.

It becomes imperative once you start working to understand the needs of the role and start learning, not every skill and expertise will come in the form of an official training assignment, you have to learn the art of acquiring skills and knowledge from daily events and experiences.

Learning itself has multiple theories around it, once you are on job it will be a combination of listening, seeing, reviewing, practicing, and it starts with curiosity and a can-do attitude is a must. Your ability to form questions from daily problems and then seek answers, will be important, for example, you were unable to solve a problem but a colleague or senior was able to do it, so the first thing is curiosity and the attitude that what was the case that you were not able to close but there were? The second would be to actually know the solution and how they figured it out. The third would be to understand the solution using any reference material physical or online, and the last would be to actually apply it.

Another way learning happens is when you stay with the problem until it is solved, this may require additional efforts, especially when you are designing or developing something, work-life balance is important but these are crucial situations that can make all the difference in whether we were able to learn something in totality or not when we stay with the problem till the end and arrive at the solution, it really helps us to connect the dots, and fill in the gaps in our concepts, and yes it makes a huge difference to our confidence and helps to build the right attitude.

When you implement something (a solution, a process) and complete the feedback loop, you can also learn a lot, as compared to when you are only a part of the implementation. When you are able to see the impact, take the feedback, and then correct things as per feedback, you are able to see the cause and effect and this helps in building a deep understanding of the problem and solution which leads to real learning.

Your curiosity in learning something new will allow you to seek new skills which may not be a part of your KRA but complementary to it, learning these skills to some level helps to do your job better, and even open opportunities for you to progress further. For example, for a tech support engineer, learning programming concepts will help you understand what is happening around you better, you will be able to communicate with right artifacts and terminologies, helping you reach solutions faster, it does not only help in improving your concepts but also provide you visibility across the teams.

In a nutshell, learning on the job or your learnability skill will be a key differentiator on how you perform and grow in your career, like other skills it is also a skill that has to be developed as you go along in your career. This doesn’t only impact your initial career but this allows you to have a deeper understanding of the work you do, helping you build and long and lasting career in Tech Industry..

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Author

Nikhil Ahluwalia
Founder Upspir
Nikhil has over 16years of experience in the industry, before starting UPSPIR he was heading the support, services, and delivery function at Exotel. and he has vast experience in managing and leading technical support and delivery teams, With Upspir he aims to take his passion of developing and mentoring people to next level by sharing his experiences and learning with those who want to build their career in the tech support domain.