* May contain technical elements.

Just as a warning this blog post is not going to particularly well structured. It's more of a writing down of some ideas that have been floating in my head for awhile, and I would certainly appreciate some of the ideas being discussed with other technicians and Network Managers. Disclaimer out the way...

It's always struck me as odd that there's no 'official' guide or training offered to Technicians. Yes, there's the FITS Foundation but it costs money, doesn't run all that often and I'm not sure it covers everything an IT technician working in education needs. But even if we took FITS as the required training, the only place I see FITS mentioned is on EduGeek. I've not seen it as a requirement on any job posting, nor did it come up at any County level technician conferences (back when Oxfordshire could afford to host such events). It leads me to a key question:

Where, as a new or inexperienced technician, are you meant to go to find out how to do your job?

Also, Where do you find best practice to ensure that what you are doing is actually what is required for your school?

I guess this all stems from a realization I had a few days ago, if I didn't read the edugeek forums, there would be great swathes of my job that I wouldn't even know were part of my responsibility. I took this job as a junior technician, under a brilliant ICT-Coordinator, but I was the only member of the tech team. For months I didn't even realise there was another server dealing with the admin side of the network, hidden away in another office! As I continued, I slowly realized that there were things that I should probably be taking care of, but never explicitly told about (back ups, web filtering, software updates etc etc). Now some of these were largely dealt with at County level, but now with the advent of acadmies and MATs and free schools, these areas are now down to the school (and their IT support) to figure out, maintain and control. Thinking back, this was around 10 years ago, and there was a lot less pressure on the computer system back then. Only around 4 members of staff used email on a daily basis(!) and the reliability of computers was such that, if they didn't work on that day, it didn't matter, teachers would just do something else that lesson. Of course, this has changed dramatically now, and IT is heavily relied upon by all aspects of the school.

I digress, my point is that there is no central body, website or guide to being a technician, no one stop shop that says what you should be doing, and offer solutions on how to achieve it. Don't get me wrong, edugeek is a fantastic resource, but the answers it provides are scattered over hundreds of different threads and blog posts. What I would propose is the creation of the "Technicians non-technical guide to being a technician". I don't know what form this would take, possible blog, wiki or old fashioned book, but more importantly I do know what I would want the content to be: useful guides on how to setup, maintain and troubleshoot an education based network. What I wouldn't want is a bunch of technical how-tos, I would want it to be as device/OS agnostic as possible, but to go into as much detail as possible where it suits.

Of course, the trouble with such a guide is who would write it. Whilst I consider one of my skills is the ability to translate the technical into the non-technical, I've only ever worked in one school, and whilst I have 10 years here, I have no real authority on what is best practice. I'd like to think I'm doing a good job, but then I get the worm of self doubt after I read another edugeeker has created a some amazing server infrastructure that I completely fail to understand, or the fact it took me well over two weeks to get my head around vLanning...

But perhaps I should aim smaller, and just write about my experiences, and not claim to be anything other than a Network Manager who's managed to get a network into a reasonable state, rather some authoritive body on the best practice of a education network.

Ultimately, I feel that if I had been given some kind of guide when I started this job, it would have made my life a lot easier. Not a specifically technical guide, like a Mastering Server 2003 book (which I did have, and was pretty useful!), but something that explains:

• What is expected of you as a technican/network manager in a school
  
• What your responsibilities are
  
• What isn't your responsibility, but what you should probably keep an eye on and report to your line manager
  
• What software could help in your job (Helpdesk, Server elements such as WSUS etc)
  
• The importance of documentation
  
• The importance of budgeting
  
• Any other bits and bobs that would be useful to know
  

As I said at the start, any feedback on this would be appreciated, would you find this kind of thing useful? Are there better sources of information out there that I don't know about? Please comment below. I also realise that this could very well just be me, and I'm unique in the way I found out all the ins and outs of my job, however I suspect that's probably not the case... In the mean time, I think I'm going to start sketching out how to write this. My inital idea is to do a series of blog posts, and then maybe try to tie them together, but we'll see how it goes...