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IT Support & Help Desk

The way in. Tier-1 help desk is the highest-volume genuinely entry-level technical job, the lowest bar of anything here, properly remote, and the trunk that cloud support, sysadmin and platform engineering all branch from. CompTIA A+ knowledge ordered for the job rather than for the exam, plus the half no hardware course teaches - working a queue, writing a ticket someone else can act on, escalating with what you ruled out, and holding a verification procedure against the social-engineering call every help desk is the target of.

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A+ Core 1 — Hardware, Networking, Printers and Cloud (220-1201)40 cards — step 1 of 3

IT Help Desk — Tier 1 Support — the courseTwenty written units. Track A orders 62 free videos for the job rather than for the exam, each with an instruction saying what to take from it and what to skip. Track B is the job itself — triage a seeded queue, write a ticket someone else can act on, escalate with what you ruled out, hold a verification procedure against a social-engineering call, and assemble the evidence pack you take to the interview. Three decks, 119 cards. No practice exam yet.

Flashcard decks

3 decks · 119 cards · in study order

1A+ Core 1 — Hardware, Networking, Printers and Cloud (220-1201)The Core 1 knowledge a help desk actually uses, taught from the symptom backwards. What a failing component does to a machine in front of a user, how to localise a network fault to the machine, the site or the far end, why most printer tickets never involve the printer, and what changes about support when the application is not on the user's computer. Paired with the free Professor Messer video course — study the unit, then drill it here.40 2A+ Core 2 — Windows, Accounts, Security and Procedures (220-1202)The Core 2 knowledge a help desk uses every shift. The Windows tools that answer questions and the command line that answers them faster, enough macOS and Linux not to be stranded, the account and access work that is the highest-volume ticket type and the most dangerous thing you are trusted with, security as it arrives in a ticket rather than as a taxonomy, backups and the actions that destroy data permanently, and the operational procedures that get a technician trusted with more. Paired with the free Professor Messer video course.39 3The Help Desk Job Itself (tickets, triage, escalation, writing, and the call that is an attack)The half of tier-1 support that no hardware course teaches and every employer interviews for. What a ticket is actually for, how to order a queue by impact rather than by volume, when to escalate and what a good handover contains, how to write notes someone else can act on, the troubleshooting method underneath it all, and the social-engineering call that every help desk is the target of. Written for someone with no experience who wants to walk into a first job knowing what the work is.40