IT Helpdesk Technician - Central London - £22,000

[dhicks]

Hello All,

 

We (still) have an opening for an IT Helpdesk Technician to assist me in general day-to-day IT support of a medium-sized, private prep school teaching children ages 3 - 13 in Knightsbridge, central London. This job is being re-advertised as we didn't find anyone the first time round. Salary is in the range £20,000 - £22,000. Applications close on Friday, 6th December with interviews in the week commencing Monday 9th December, with the job commencing in January 2014. The official ad, job description and application form are attached to this post - they wouldn't let me just put "must be smart, get things done", so to summarise: we require some to provide excellent first and second line technical support to all members of the school community. Over the summer we've invested in new network wiring throughout the school, brand new HP switches, new AV equipment in classrooms, a new server room, updated servers and a new telephone system, and we now require another member of staff to help us configure and maintain this equipment and develop our IT provision to support teaching throughout the school.

 

This job is a junior role, with the idea that we want someone with a genuine interest in IT and the practice of applying their IT knowledge in a practical setting. Obviously we'll need someone reasonably bright, but a degree isn't an absolute requirement, we will look at experience and so forth as well. Certainly initially the job will involve a fair bit of practical work tidying cables in classrooms, mounting equipment to walls, crimping network cables, etc - we'll be needing someone who can use a drill and a saw without cutting bits of themselves off, please.

 

We run XenServer 6.2 as our virtulisation platform on two physical servers with a third mirrored backup, we use HP switches (including, possibly, software defined networking), we use both Windows and Linux servers and client machines are mostly currently Windows 7 PCs and laptops but with a growing number of iOS and Android user-owned devices. We have a vanilla Windows domain running on Windows Server 2008 R2 and an Exchange 2010 mail server. We have just moved to using Firefly as a VLE, which is running on an SQL Server 2012 server. We have a school-wide Ruckus wireless system and the newly-installed physical backbone is 10 gigabit fibre from the core to the edge switches with 1 gigabit copper to the desktop. We use an IQ PBX (Asterisk-based) for VoIP telephony and a Lightspeed filtering appliance and SonicWall firewall appliance on our Ethernet First Mile Internet connection.

 

The job should hopefully offer an excellent opportunity to get practical experience with a range of interesting technologies. All IT support is handled in-house, with oversight by an external consultant - there is no managed IT company, and we are an independant school so there is no local authority involved, either. Larger or more specialised jobs are generally done by various contractors - the structured networking cabling, printer repair, AV installations and so on. The IT department works closly with the school caretakers, especially when it comes to the various events during the school term, and we have a good relationship with the various self-employed contractors who come in to do electrics, plumbing and so on. We have a proper ICT teacher with a computer science degree who, naturally, works closly with the IT support team to provide the teaching environment required to stretch people's ideas of what can be done with ICT learning in a school.

 

There will also be a fair bit of audio visual work, with equipment to be lugged around, set up and operated. We have some sound and lighting equipment, with some more on the way, and there are regular school productions and events to deal with - the job might well suite someone with an interest or qualifications in sound or lighting production. We have a number of large multifunction printers around the school, and the job does involve in keeping those up-and-running on a day-to-day basis, although any actual reapirs are handled by the contracting company.

 

The job is very end-user facing, and you will spend your days working with, supporting and training teachers, other staff and children - paitience and a sense of humor are going to be required. Obviously, you will need to be CRB checked. Hours are from 7:30am until 6pm, with the aim being that the full school day is covered for IT support. There will be reduced hours during the school holidays, so your hours will average out over the year. Lunch is provided for free in our school canteen. We have a large amount of stairs and are spread over 6 floors, so you'll need to be reasonably fit and capable of lifting reasonable loads (bits of audio equipment, boxes of paper and so on).

 

If you have any questions or require further information please email [email protected] or, of course, PM me or simply post in this thread. You can download a job description and application form from our website or straight from this post:

 

Personnel Spec - Helpdesk Technician.doc

Support Staff application form.doc

Helpdesk Technician job description.doc

[featured_spectre]

Can i apply?

[dhicks]

Can i apply?

 

Yes, of course (PM sent) - I should point out that it's not just me filtering job applications, the bursar and the external IT consultant will have their own criteria, too. Just from previous experience, after posting the job on Gumtree last time we had around 110 applications, of which about 6 filled in the application form.

[gwendes]

Yes, of course (PM sent) - I should point out that it's not just me filtering job applications, the bursar and the external IT consultant will have their own criteria, too. Just from previous experience, after posting the job on Gumtree last time we had around 110 applications, of which about 6 filled in the application form.

 

Unfortunately quite common as even strong candidates often fail to match themselves to the job on paper. Remember kids, the application form is not just a place to copy and paste your CV!

[Nixon77]

See it depends what you mean by smart, I know what I need to, but I have no professional qualiifcations.

 

Unfortunately I doubt I would be very good at training adults let alone children, good luck with your search.

[dhicks]

See it depends what you mean by smart, I know what I need to, but I have no professional qualiifcations. Unfortunately I doubt I would be very good at training adults let alone children, good luck with your search.

 

"Smart" in this case probably means "able to problem solve and work things out for themselves" - the kind of person who can take a teacher's garbled explanation, figure out what the actual symptons are, then go and search Google for an answer. We will certainly consider all applications - we require a good level of written and spoken English, and some kind of further education (degree, HND, GNVQ, etc) would certainly help, but that doesn't neccesarily have to be in a computing-related subject. "Training" in this case simply means explaining things to a teacher (or maybe pupil) - you won't be required to suddenly lead an adult education class or anything. Please do apply if you think the job sounds like the kind of thing you would find interesting - someone with a healthy interest in general computing is going to be more use than someone who did a computing degree because they thought it would lead to a well-paid job.

[dhicks]

Unfortunately quite common as even strong candidates often fail to match themselves to the job on paper. Remember kids, the application form is not just a place to copy and paste your CV!

 

This job is now up on the TES website too:

 

ICT Helpdesk Technician, Kensington and Chelsea - TES Jobs

 

Of the applications we've had in so far this time round, the application form has either been missing or had gaps in information - as you point out, it's not a place to cut-and-paste-your-CV!