Can you work from home as an IT technician? (MUST KNOW)

Before I got started in IT and technology generally, I always thought to myself how flexible is it actually working from home when you’re working in tech. 

Depending on the work level, it is very possible for an IT Technician to work from home, if you are required to manage hardware and deal with conference rooms it would be more common to have a combination home/office.

Now, obviously, this varies from company to company and the normality of employees working from home schedule. In a general sense, it is very likely to have the ability to work from home as long as you have remote tools to support your users. I will get a bit deeper in the below chapters to really break them down for you.

Can You Actually Work from Home 

Working from has become prevalent in the workforce and has been practised for a long period of time within the IT sector. Since IT support predominantly are needed on site for helping end-users, other departments such as Network engineers, software engineers and System Administrators can actively do their work from home. In the past, these engineers would have around 1 day a week working from home, but that has changed dramatically since the pandemic. 

Instilling Trust 

Additionally, more and more companies have adopted the concept of working from home. The main incentives of making employees work from home are instilling trust which makes the employee feel a sense of being valued and able to complete the work without the need of being supervised in an office. 

Commute Time

An additional reason for IT employees working from home is the ability to claim back your time on commuting! For the majority of people, we usually travel 1-2hrs a day some times more. Even though we are able to use that time effectively, we can use this time now to spend more time with family and really appreciated the work/life balance. This also makes the employees work harder and more effectively for the company due to the time being saved.

Working Efficiently 

As part of the benefit of working from it has resulted in many individuals including myself to work much more productively and get work done much more. Though many would argue that is relatively difficult due to children and distractions, being self-disciplined is crucial at this point to be absolutely productive. 

Working from home increases productivity and the ability to come to work more motivated. These are some of the reasons why many prefer working from home and IT roles can provide that benefit for spring IT engineers.

A Customizable Office

Working from home also enables you to have a dedicated place to work in the comfort of your own home which provides the benefit of having full control over your space and items. You can literally choose anywhere around your house and kit out the office you’ve always wanted. 

Work From Anywhere

One of the other reasons as to why most people love the flexibility of working from home is that you can work at home, coffee shops, friends house, hotel and much more! As long as you have your laptop and your company offers VPN solutions to access their servers, you’re all set! These are all reasons as to why most people love to work from home and hence, your question whether an IT professional can work from home! 

Role of an IT Support Technician 

When you’re trying to figure out whether you’re able to work from home as an IT technician, you really need to think about your job duties and what you are actually doing to make that judgement and assess the situation better. 

Firstly, we have to think about the role of an IT technician in an enterprise environment.

• To handle all IT hardware and software for the business
• Answer queries In person, email and via Teams/Zoom/Slack.
• Support and resolve technical issues for end-user

This would be a small example of what could be a typical day for an IT support technician and as you can see there is some form of need to be in the office. If your looking to be fully remote then 100% of the role should be remote. This is not to say that you’re unable to work from home, you would have different days a week in the office and the rest at home. 

Whereas other companies may have an automated approach with physical equipment. For example, if your company is using Intune, you can ship their device to their house and they will have the Out Of the Box experience with no intervention from IT. Instead of traditionally setting up their laptop and phone, Microsoft will handle all this for you and you are only responsible for the configuration of these devices. You can read more here.

Since aspects of our life has dramatically changed due to the pandemic, there has been a high increase with IT support technicians and engineers working fully remote with more and more companies adopting work from home cultures. This is because organisations have started to leverage the cloud which literally destroys the concept of having on-premises and on-site tech, and they have now moved to a more hybrid/cloud approach by providing their employees to do everything they need remotely.