This article takes a look at a standard day for a PC technician. As you’ll see, the broad range of skills required for this job make it one of the more challenging IT roles.

It is probably more apt to say that each day as a PC technician will bring up new challenges and tasks they won’t have seen before. This is to a large part due to the broad skill-set required of these roles. Any day may consist of hardware upgrades, removing viruses, updating system software, administrating network, etc.

One large factor affecting the role is whether the PC technician is based in the field, or a bench technician. A bench technician traditionally works in PC repair shops, upgrading computers and using PC maintenance software to repair software faults. The role has more consistent work hours and requires a broad range of skills to handle the repairs the shop sees.

A field technician, on the other hand, works onsite at customer locations work on more specialized technologies (e.g. networks, mainframes, PC setup, user administration, etc.).

The daily role of a technician will always incorporate further training and learning to stay current with products and systems. In the early phases becoming a qualified computer service technician provides a solid grounding and skillset for entering field/bench work and further education/diplomas can focus in on specialist subjects (e.g. data recovery).

The daily activities of this role can lead to consultancy specialization for field technicians. Bench technician work is more often a pre-cursor to setting up one’s own PC repair shop or call-out service. That said, either strand could switch between the two mid-career with some training.

Each PC technician will have a different career path leading to specialization or setting up their own business. The one over-riding factor though will be that the role will always involve ongoing training and studies as technology changes.

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