I have now been working 25 years for Education ICT Services. / Schools ICT / NYES Digital.

When I joined in 1997 we were a team of about 12. If you knew and understood the following you could probably fix 95% of IT problems in any North Yorkshire school:

• Novel Netware 3.x (install, setup IPX/SPX networking, configure user accounts and file and folder permissions)
• Windows 3.1 / 95 (install, configure a network connection, edit registry in extreme cases)
• Peer to peer networking  (Windows and NetBEUI)
• Tape Backup (Arcserve)
• BNC networking with Co-axial cables
• Office 95/97 – install from floppy disk (or maybe a CD if you were lucky)
• Script – install, configure
• Key Solutions – install, configure
• Get a printer to work properly (still virtually impossible)

And that was it. That was pretty much everything you needed to know. And it was only for school office / admin computers. No curriculum computers to worry about.

If you were really advanced you might consider installing a modem and connecting to the internet.

Since then, so much has changed, and at an ever-increasing rate so it seems. Now we are a team of closer to 50 and I wouldn’t like to even start to make a list of what we have to know about and understand to support a school and their use of IT. And that’s not even counting commercial customers that we also now support. It certainly wouldn’t fit on the 15 or so index cards I used to carry around with me listing everything I needed to know to install a new admin PC in a school.