Network Manager - Training Recommendations

[BlueBoxMan]

Good Afternoon All,

 

I am currently employed as an Assistant IT Manager in a secondary, our old Network Manager has left and we have yet to reappoint, in the interim I was wondering if anyone on here had any recommendations for courses (ones that have a qualification/exam linked to them) to take to learn the relevant networking, routing and switching skills to be a qualified Network Manager?

 

As I would need the school to fund it, the cheaper the better ideally

 

I have completed a Level 4 network engineer course from City and Guilds but it really only touches on the actual networking side of things

 

Any recommendations greatly appreciated

[psydii]

The NM is a managerial and "leadership" role. So these are the skills where the biggest gap is likely to be. These can be developed on the job with support from your peers and SLT.

 

Work with Finance to understand how to build a budget proposal.

Work with Finance to understand how to track expenditure against the budget you have been allocated.

 

Understand what data from the service desk matters to senior management

Understand what data from the service desk matters to *you* keeping ahead of problems.

Understand what HoD's and the key users of the service want and need. Make sure you are collecting data to measure how you are performing against their expectations. Discuss with your link SLT whether the priorities of the HoD's/ Key users aligns with the priorities as SLT perceive them to be.

 

Write a monthly report that summarises your expenditure against projects and targets, the service desk metrics SLT care about, and the metrics you care about that you want SLT to know you care about.

 

Documentation: Read all the documentation that exists for each system and service. Anytime there is information in a document that you don't fully understand, set aside time to dig into and and understand it. Any system or service that is not documented, document; you may not initially understand it fully, but again, set aside time to dig in and figure it out.

 

Technical training - the above documentation piece will help you identify where actually vendor training might be useful.

 

Finally work with Finance on asset lifecycles. There is a planning aspect here related to budgeting, but also an operational aspect around procurement - many IT projects cross out of the "buy it from amazon because its the cheapest" through "get three quotes against a quick and dirty specification" and into the "write a detailed spec, invite suppliers to tender, score them and award", and sometimes even into the "use a framework/hire a specialist with insurance to run the tender". It's good to be ahead of the auditors.

Edited February 19, 2025 by psydii

[PotNoodleTech]

I think cybersecurity is going to be one of the biggest needs most schools over the next 10 years. See if you can work on some free MS and Google training too. In an ideal world you'd get some general management training as per post above. They days of doing just network and server training are kinda over that's a small (and getting ever smaller) part of the job nowadays.

 

Be tip top on the schools safeguarding policy they's almost garunteed to ask you about that.

[BlueBoxMan]

Thanks for your replies, I agree there's more to the role than just the knowledge of networking, its all very much appreciated!