A day in the life of an IT apprentice
As part of National Apprenticeship Week (6 – 12 February 2023), the apprenticeship team has been asking apprentices about what ‘a day in the life of an apprentice’ is like for them.
Henry Price is a network support technician at Mayfield School. Read on to hear Henry’s account of his working day…
I am a network technician working for Mayfield school in Portsmouth, currently working towards completing my level 3 IT Support Technician apprenticeship. I started in November 2021, I have learned and experienced far more than I would have imagined, from replacing keyboards and mouses to accessing the server to do tasks. I want to improve my understanding of IT and gain knowledge of aspects of IT around networking. This has always interested me, and I enjoy the satisfaction of getting a difficult task done.
During the day my main responsibility is to upkeep all technology in the building, with daily checks to IT rooms and laptop trolleys that are dotted around the school. As well as checking on paper for printers around the school. However, when I am not doing the checks around the school, I am answering tickets on the helpdesk. Where staff submit tickets to the helpdesk whose contents say the problem they are having and that they need IT support to solve the issue. Sometimes these are easy tickets, where it is replacing an external keyboard but sometimes, the ticket could be installing a piece of software onto several devices at once. Which could prove difficult if they are in use quite often.
Our days are normally quite busy, with the number of checks myself and my colleague must do on a day-to-day basis, including the helpdesk tickets. We normally get between 5-10 tickets per day, we attempt to complete these tasks on the day. If not, then it will be passed onto the next day with being the first thing that I do. Also, a very important part of doing tickets on the helpdesk is the prioritisation of tasks depending on their importance. This scale of importance Is based on what I think has the most impact. For example, a task that stops a lesson completely and needs to be fixed. This will be a high impact, meaning that this needs to be looked at first. Then something that is an annoyance but has a workaround that solves the issue will be low impact, which means that this will be looked at after completing more pressing tasks.
As an apprentice, I found it difficult at the start, to learn the ways around my job with also attempting to know everyone’s names. I found it hard to gain confidence at first, but once I got past 6 months, I found my feet and started to feel confident in what I was doing. I realised with time that there are different behaviours in different situations. Overall, it is the best decision I have made with my career, I am enjoying all aspects.
