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What is a technical support engineer?

Technical support engineers provide troubleshooting and technical support services. The parties involved on the other end may be internal as well as external clients across several industries such as telecom, healthcare, and financial services.

Just how every large company has its own IT department, the primary function of this department is to provide tech support to others. Medium- and large-size companies often bifurcate their technical support into two main categories that are mentioned as follows:

* Those engineers that help in the internal departments and its employees.

* Those representatives that are client-facing and interacting with customers who have called in or started a live chat seeking help for some issue.

Typically, the technical support engineer is a mid-career position holder who provides high levels of job satisfaction to the employees or clients. People looking for career path into tech support should really seek a degree in computer engineering, computer science, engineering or technical discipline depending on the type of company that they would like to work for.

Technical Support Engineer Roles and Responsibilities

Let us now look at the various technical support engineer roles and responsibilities so that you can get a better understanding of the same:

Monitoring systems

Continuous monitoring of systems as well as software is a very major part of being a technical support engineer. Monitoring tools might be custom based or even purchased by an enterprise service provider. Some providers like Microsoft provide effective tools and then it will be the job of the technical support engineer to do the following things;

* Determine which tools are actually the best and most appropriate to use.

* Train all the important parties on how exactly to use them including other help desk employees.

* Analyse the document and resolve all the issues if any.

Troubleshooting, diagnosis, resolution & escalation

Technical support engineers normally have a running queue of issues which they are working to resolve and they are responsible for prioritizing as well as managing the workflow to resolution. The first step in resolving a case is troubleshooting as it is a logical process to find the source of an issue first, in order to solve the problem. Only once the issue has been reproduced, Tech Support Engineers can do the following things:

* Look for causality

* Diagnose the issue

* Resolve it

Interacting with customers

Apart from handling the cases with customers who are experiencing software malfunctions, technical support engineers also have to communicate with new employees during the on-boarding process and offer on-going training and education to the customers. Technical support engineers may do the following:

* Be required to participate in Forums or Masterclass sessions across any particular organization

* Lend their voice to the training tutorials or be a key presenter in a webinar

* Spend most of their day talking to other people who they have to deal with.

Technical knowledge

Most organizations anticipate to be a resource of information and technical knowledge and more often, this comes from hands-on experience and professional development than just another normal academic learning. 

Skills needed: Companies look for certain capabilities and the most imperative one is technical knowledge. A strong basis in computer science is the first step and from there, companies will look for the skills which match their enterprise needs and requirements. These may include knowledge of the following things:

* Network security

* Broad knowledge of virtual environments

* Experience with specific enterprise software

* CRMs

* Understanding source code

* Writing commands and workflow processes

* Using monitoring software

* Comfortable with several types of apps

* Proven experience with the troubleshooting and diagnosing problems

* Enterprise hardware expertise

* VPN technology and redundancy and other security measures

* SQL

 

Organizations of all sizes hire technical support engineers in today’s time. This particular field is expected to grow at an above average rate of 12% by the year 2024. According to research, roughly 800,000 jobs fall under the roof of Computer Support Specialists which includes technical support engineers as well.

While people who enter this career field normally spend about 20 years in support before moving on to some other career paths, there are a myriad of technical jobs available to them. Some paths outside of the support that technical support engineers explore or move into include the following:

* Software engineer

* Network engineer

* Systems administrator 

* Senior software developer

* IT manager

* Project or product manager (IT)

Find the perfect Technical Support Engineer Role

In a field which is extensively becoming high-demand in today’s time, now is the correct time to hunt for and start a career as a part time or full time technical support engineer. We now hope that you have got a fair idea of what exactly the Technical support roles and responsibilities are. Field Engineer offers remote and freelance jobs globally on their job marketplace so what are you waiting for? Let us help you to find a role among thousands of technical support engineer jobs in your dream company.