Having a dedicated technical support team ready and waiting is great to have, but this doesn’t happen often. It is more likely that you will have to find a solution to your problem yourself, or send your equipment off to get repaired. To minimise cost and to maximise efficiency, you could learn how to troubleshoot, diagnose and ultimately fix most problems that you might run into.
General problems can include:
- Computer failing to start
- Computer is too slow
- Strange noises coming from your computer
- Overheating (especially in laptops)
- Lost network connections
- Operating System not functioning as normal
Knowing how to solve these general problems, can save you (and your IT department) a lot of time. If your IT department is constant running around trying to solve every small printer issue, they would never be able to do their jobs as systems administrators and making sure everything is running smoothly.
Being a PC technician could also be a lucrative career path, seeing as we are moving ever closer to the 4th industrial revolution, especially if you have more specialised skills in robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the internet of things.
The world is changing; we are already seeing some of the effects that a digitised world has in store. Bitcoin has been in quite some discussion recently (and controversy), but a decentralised currency, not controlled by banks and governments, might be just one example of the things to come.
Another example of the things to come could be that through machine learning and artificial intelligence, DeepMind’s AI system successfully predicted the structure of nearly every protein that has ever been found, in 3D.
What used to take biologists months to do, can now be done in seconds. It does not take a technical mastermind to learn technical computer skills, or even more specialised computer skills like coding. With the world changing so rapidly, we must change with it, or be left behind.
