I went to a local vocational school called CDI College and took what they then called the Network Admin curriculum. It started out very simply with a course called A+ which is the standard certification for PC hardware repair. I say it started out simply because it’s really uphill from there. Hardware is the first building block that any self-respecting IT professional should know inside and out, but whether or not you spring for the actual certification is more a matter of whether the current job market demands it.

Did I need to go to school for it? No. I had enough computers to experiment with at home that I could have read the A+ textbook and aced the test within a couple of weeks. What school did provide is a structured environment and ultimately some connections for me to utilize later on. Actually the same thing was true of the rest of the course. I could easily have done it at home with the tools I already had. For all the money spent on schooling, I could have just checked out the list of textbooks and gone to town reading them. As it is, I was privately funded so was not required to attend every day. So I ended up doing the work from home all week, then I’d show up on Friday, do a quick 15 minute test and go back home. Aside from the more complex network theory course which covered IP addressing, subnetting, binary math and DNS, I generally completed a course a week. And graduated with honours.

To be a successful PC technician, you only really need three things. A knack for problem solving, patience, and a mastery of Google searches. When my brain fails me, Google never does. You can find anything on Google. But even Google has its shortcomings. If ever I have a problem finding something, I know that I’m simply asking the wrong question, or using the wrong search words. So try a few combinations – sometimes I even have to dumb down the language to be a bit more vague before finding what I’m looking for, since the majority of the internet public aren’t experts and probably don’t know the correct terms for things.

Most of my clients still refer to the Tower as the “Hard Drive” or the monitor as the “computer”. This is a daily problem.

The computer technician’s worst enemy is coincidence. I dread the times when I take a sickly PC to the shop for one problem and return it to my client, only to have it returned to me a few days later with a new problem, and a strong sense that they suspect I caused it. For example, a couple weeks back I took in a computer that was laden with viruses. I took it away and wiped it, returned it, and the very next day their video card started glitching up on them, with visual artifacts all over the screen and textures all distorted. They were very nice actually and at I never got the sense that they thought it was my fault, but I always dread the coincidence. After all, who was the last person to mess with the insides of their computer?

I experiment a lot. Quite often I’ll work on a home network or server project simply because I’ve never performed it before. From Virtual servers using Hyper-V or VMWare, to Virtual LANs, self-web and email hosting, Dynamic DNS, cabling, VPN, RIS, and much more. Never underestimate the value of experimentation, even if what you do now doesn’t require it. The most valuable thing you can have is knowledge that your peers don’t.

Another skill you’ll find useful is a good memory for details. I once spent the better part of two years travelling to ranger stations and remote forestry offices all over British Columbia. I was participating in a workstation rollout program for IBM (who was in the middle of its “Lenovo” name change), the Ministry of Forests, and the Ministry of Environment. When you personally crank out 4-8 computers in a day, the patterns show up really fast. Clients or other techs would come to me for solutions and at times couldn’t even finish a sentence before I knew exactly what the problem was. Workplace experience is all about recognizing the patterns.

And lastly what you’ll need is a passion for the field. I’ve known technicians and programmers who don’t even own a computer. Personally I believe this severely limits their  potential. It could be argued that they at least have a life outside of work, but the truth is if you don’t love your work, you’ll never rise above your peers.