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Description

This is an ideal career for analytical thinkers. An IT Systems Engineer focuses on providing technical support, consulting and expertise to businesses. Roles within the industry, tend to start at a lower technical level and gradually increase based on skill, knowledge and ability to address technical and non-technical problems and communicate their resolution, especially to non-technical people.

Career Advice - IT Systems Engineer Career

As an IT Systems Engineer, you are expected to keep up with the latest and greatest technologies; have a keen interest in discovering new advances; and to always be up for a challenge.

The IT System Engineer tends to come in two different flavours, which can normally be changed during your career. The first, and more traditional, is the internal IT departmental role, and the second is an outsourced role, working for an IT firm, supporting clients & customers of the firm.

What you do every day

For both types of IT Systems Engineer roles, your daily routine would normally consist of the following key points:

In addition to the daily routine, you would normally find yourself with a few ongoing projects and tasks that would tend to have second preference to your daily routine. For example:

You need to be proactive, finding problems and solutions before they become issues. Your main task, however, is keeping other people productive. You need to make sure that decisions you make are in the best interest of the company, and that you have a broad and longer term picture of the direction the system needs to take.

Personality that best fits this occupation

If you have a major focus on technical challenges and achievements, you could be suited to an IT System Engineer role. You will be pressed with a lot of stress, but you need to be able to focus on the ‘big picture’ and work towards your end goal.

Communication is central  in IT, and it’s an area where the majority of IT professionals are lacking. Being able to communicate a problem and a resolution is paramount in developing your personal respect with peers.  Successful communication and your analytical thinking will help ensure that you can meet the organisation’s expectations of you. If you don’t have good communication skills, people will disregard your reasoning and unjustly blame you for every mishap on the IT system, regardless of its cause.

The ability to keep focus and a ‘cool head’ under pressure and stress is very important. When your organisation IT system is on the blink, and you have been tasked with fixing it, being able to focus on the task at hand rather than the pressure is very important is ensuring that you don’t make any unnecessary mistakes.

Best things about this career

The best things about being an IT System Engineer is when you complete a major project that has involved countless hours of preparation, planning, implementation and testing - and everything works out! You just have to go around telling everyone what you have achieved. The knowledge of working towards a goal and meeting it, can be just as rewarding as your pay packet.

Worst things about this career

This is probably the first thing that comes to everyone when they think of IT catastrophes: the 3am all-nighter trying to fix a server crash - you have reached the last possible resolution and it fails. You know that it cannot be fixed, and you haven’t got any other option but to lose data. Then to have the company director chew your ear off about it. The only thing left is to ask for more budget.