What are the best practices for creating engaging and effective technical support certification programs?

Identify the skills required: Start by identifying the skills required for the team to perform its tasks effectively. This could involve reviewing the team's job descriptions and identifying key skills required for the role. Evaluate current skills: Next, assess the team's current skills against the skills required. This could involve conducting skills assessments, reviewing performance data, and soliciting feedback from team members and managers. Identify gaps: Identify areas where the team's skills do not meet the requirements of the job. This could involve identifying skills that are lacking, skills that need improvement, or skills that are not relevant to the team's current tasks. Develop a plan and monitor progress.

Establish a tiered set of competencies mapped to the business needs of your organizations. For example; SLA adherence at Tiers 1-3. Review existing technical ticket data, resolution rates and average length of time of resolution. Interview business leaders, and capture their impressions about their service experience history.

When attempting to determine any skill gaps or collaboration challenges I tend to work with the team in question on a small project that is skill oriented. EG: A code project for code skill evaluation, hardware builds for infrastructure evaluation. This will work commonly as a filter. People who are more skilled in one thing trend towards that skillset. Quizzes and surveys are a starting point but conceptual skill vs experience/realized skill is something that doesn't always translate properly through those types of systems. If practical training or testing isn't possible then having the person(s) describe or diagram processes then an experienced individual should be able to find a good training start point or at least a proper target.

Lesrning styles are a myth so avoid creating unnecessary content and spending needless resources on assumed preferences. Instead, analyze the required skills by job tasks performed. For example, eLearning software simulations would be better aligned to confirm that a learner can perform the action sequence of closing a ticket. Virtual Machines (VMs) can provide a realistic experience for technicians to deomnstrate how to provision user accounts on a server. Aside feom training content, provide a knowledge base application or web pages for learners to find helpful information in the time of need.

Web-based, Self service is the best for general skills. for detailed or safety-related skills Practical in person is the best. For some training systems having a "Test out" option should be mandatory. When an employee is onboarded it's under the assumption that they can fulfill the duties and requirements of the hired role. Specified training in a skill or job function should always be offered but if someone frequently changes jobs or positions or contracts there should be an option to do a knowledge test to save them time in onboarding then they can move towards practical work and skill training they need. especially if the training is quarterly or annually.

This is good. In addition provide a documentstion tool/app to capture new information and update for changes that arise. Schedule weekly or biweekly standup meetings to answer questions and guide performance.

When developing any certification training it's always good to engage people who have experience in the field, to tailor the training to the real world. So many times I personally have seen people struggle with situations not covered in typical certification training because it's not tailored to help a technician think on their feet. Good certification training is a basis of understanding so that someone can use that knowledge with their own problem-solving skills to be effective at their job.

You can get additional feedback metrics from linking issues to knowledge base articles, that way the article’s effectiveness is measured against the other metrics gathered as well. For instance if an issue is linked to a KB article and the support is always rated poorly, that might be an indication that the article itself is not resolving the issue effectively and needs to be reviewed.

Evaluative feedback is always best as a direct item in the training or certification. doing after-test surveys things get lost in translation or people are tired of woking on test and study items. putting small breadcrumbs of feedback that directly relate to situations or questions that can also be integrated into the certification testing is much more valuable. EG: After a question on the test there can be a write-in "have you experienced a situation like this? what can you tell us about your experience or thoughts on this scenario" etc.

To add to the "Relevant and Practical" there needs to be some hands-on work. Additionally, from my experience as an ASE3 instructor, there needs to be more focus on teaching people how to troubleshoot. This is rarely taught anymore. I have found my students learn and progress further when they understand the reason behind what they are doing. People who are good at Algebra, make great troubleshooters because Algebra at its' core is problem-solving.

Techs need correct schematics and SOP's for their jobs. Technology now at its peak can be very helpful. It needs to be useful technology. Techs want to complete jobs in one session. They need to be informed properly on how to do their jobs. Tech support if doing the training needs to field qualified as well.

All points mentioned are important, but don't forget how AI can help support technicians to troubleshoot problems much quicker. Perhaps AI should be considered as the first level support and then have it escalate to human support to ultimately solve complex issues. There are many private/internal troubleshooting docs and wiki docs that AI models should be trained on helping support technicians to resolve company specific issues. AI models that interacts with the technicians to help them sharpen their troubleshooting skills are paramount to fill in the gaps that AI get stuck on. My fear is AI my eventually replace human troubleshooters as this may be inevitable.

The timeliness of certification is critical, one thing to ensure is that it's not always bleeding edge but in line with its core customer base. Dealing with networking is something that spans timelines forward and backward. needing to understand current and modern networking systems but in some markets, the networks can be OLD. Ensuring the certification encompasses all of the market segments it's based on is critical otherwise people will be ill-prepared for legacy systems.