Most Needed Computer Skills for Your IT Staff

In the IT industry, if you lack advanced technical IT skills, you don't need to worry much. You only need dedication and discipline to set aside a few hours every week for self-study or self-learning. In this article we tell you which IT skills are necessary for IT service providers that are small businesses.

Learn the ropes of the products in question

You can usually negotiate with major software authors to give you a not-for-resale copy of a software product that you are planning to sell or support. You can then play with this copy in your lab. Walk through the basic installation procedures of the software in question. Play around with it and deliberately break the setup, and uninstall and reinstall it with different features until you get comfortable dealing with it.

Usually the software products that you will be selling to your small business IT outfits are very mature technologies already. They are wizard-driven, and so tend not to require those complex IT skills that seem to put you off.

Installations Are Easier

Many years ago, it was much more difficult to install a Novell NetWare suite or Microsoft Small Business Server. But these companies have now improved their offerings a lot to make it easy for even novice computer users to install and run their business application server suites.

To service demanding clients to their satisfaction, your staff needs to:

1. have good basic PC hardware skills

2. be able to handle a networking setup

3. understand networking protocols such as TCP/IP

4. know how to configure email accounts using POP3 and SMTP

5. know how to work with routers

If you and your staff have these skills, you have a good chance of winning the hearts and minds of a majority of your existing and prospective clients that have 10-20 seats.

Share the knowledge

It's a good idea to let your staff members cross-train yourself and other staff. Invest in quality training programs for your staff. Share the knowledge through a knowledge repository. Give incentives for sharing knowledge with one another. This way, even if some of the staff were to defect from your business, you can carry on with the remaining staff.

The Bottom Line on Computer Skills

In this article we have dwelled upon which computer/IT skills generally tend to be in demand with mid-size or medium-scale small businesses.