IT Solutions Technician Apprenticeship Standard

Indi­vid­ual employ­ers will set selec­tion cri­te­ria, but it is like­ly to include 5 GCSEs at grade C/4 and above includ­ing Eng­lish and Maths and Sci­ence or a Tech­nol­o­gy sub­ject; a rel­e­vant Lev­el 2 Appren­tice­ship; oth­er rel­e­vant qual­i­fi­ca­tions and expe­ri­ence; or an apti­tude test with a focus on IT Skills. 

You will also require a suit­able sup­port­ive employ­er who will guide you through your Appren­tice­ship. If you do not have an employ­er already you can apply for Appren­tice­ship vacan­cies are adver­tised on our website.

We strong­ly advise you to com­plete a min­i­mum of 2 weeks work expe­ri­ence with your employ­er pri­or to the start of your Appren­tice­ship to ensure it is a suit­able organ­i­sa­tion for your needs. 

This Appren­tice­ship is recog­nised for entry onto the BCS, The Char­tered Insti­tute for IT, Reg­is­ter of IT Tech­ni­cians con­firm­ing Lev­el 3 pro­fes­sion­al com­pe­tence.
Suc­cess­ful can­di­dates can progress onto a Higher/​Degree Appren­tice­ship, con­tin­ue with full time education. 

Typ­i­cal job titles include IT Solu­tions Tech­ni­cian, Ser­vice Ana­lyst, Junior Sys­tems Ana­lyst, Sys­tems Devel­op­er, Data­base Tech­ni­cian, IT Sup­port Ana­lyst, IT Sup­port Tech­ni­cian, IT Sys­tems Sup­port, Junior DevOps Pro­fes­sion­al, IT Ser­vice Desk or Appli­ca­tions Sup­port Tech­ni­cian (at 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th line support) 

On this pro­gramme your will be taught to apply a pro­fes­sion­al method­ol­o­gy or frame­work to gath­er and analyse require­ments; to design, devel­op, test and imple­ment IT solu­tions and to pro­vide ongo­ing sup­port both direct­ly to end users and for the under­ly­ing IT services. 

Tech­ni­cal Skills
• Apply a pro­fes­sion­al method­ol­o­gy or frame­work in their work tasks.
• Apply a range of tech­ni­cal IT skills, includ­ing: access­ing remote sys­tems; file manip­u­la­tion; file edit­ing, chang­ing sys­tem or appli­ca­tion set­tings; sys­tem admin­is­tra­tion; set­ting up and upgrad­ing com­po­nents (infra­struc­ture or soft­ware). Oper­ates in line with organ­i­sa­tion­al poli­cies, stan­dards, leg­is­la­tion, secu­ri­ty require­ments, pro­fes­sion­al ethics, pri­va­cy and con­fi­den­tial­i­ty; and under­stands esca­la­tion poli­cies.
• Cre­ate and main­tain doc­u­men­ta­tion in accor­dance with best prac­tice, organ­i­sa­tion­al guid­ance and leg­is­la­tion.
• Iden­tiy appro­pri­ate tech­ni­cal solu­tions using both log­i­cal and cre­ative think­ing.
• Diag­nose and under­stand client require­ments and prob­lems using sound ana­lyt­i­cal and prob­lem solv­ing skills.
• Effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions includ­ing for­mal and infor­mal­ly both with­in their team and exter­nal­ly.
• Oper­ate secure­ly across all their areas of respon­si­bil­i­ty, in line with organ­i­sa­tion­al guid­ance and leg­is­la­tion.
• Work at any stage of the hard­ware solu­tion life­cy­cle
• Install and con­fig­ure basic hard­ware sys­tem com­po­nents, net­works and devices (includ­ing servers, end-user com­put­ers, and mobile devices, whether phys­i­cal or vir­tu­al) as required.
• Demon­strates safe appli­ca­tion of the con­cepts of Elec­tro­Sta­t­ic Dis­charge (ESD) and meets appro­pri­ate health and safe­ty stan­dards when work­ing with hardware. 

Tech­in­cal Knowl­edge and Under­stand­ing
• On the com­ple­tion of the Appren­tice you will be able to under­stand:
• The stages with­in the over­all solu­tion life­cy­cle.
• The main prin­ci­ples, fea­tures, dif­fer­ences and ben­e­fits of Water­fall and Agile type method­olo­gies and the func­tion of ser­vice man­ag­ment frame­works.
• The aims and ben­e­fits of DevOps approach­es: includ­ing the ben­e­fits of automa­tion the ideas behind con­tin­u­ous inte­gra­tion and mon­i­tor­ing.
• The prin­ci­ples of Solu­tion Archi­tec­ture includ­ing the impor­tance of re-use.
• Why test­ing is nec­es­sary, the need for both func­tion­al and non-func­tion­al test­ing, the dif­fer­ent type of test­ing avali­able, includ­ing unit test­ing, inte­gra­tion test­ing, user accep­tance test­ing and per­for­mance test­ing.
• Plan­ning and deliv­ery with­in their role and how this con­tributes to the wider team and the organ­i­sa­tion.
• How the end-user con­text influ­ences the solu­tion.
• The key fea­tures of, and where to find, organ­i­sa­tion­al require­ments in rela­tion to poli­cies, stan­dards, leg­is­la­tion, pro­fes­sion­al ethics, pri­va­cy and con­fi­den­tial­i­ty.
• The main leg­is­la­tion, poli­cies and stan­dards that apply to IT solu­tions.
• The con­cepts of net­work­ing includ­ing the ISO (Inter­na­tion­al Organ­i­sa­tion for Stan­dard­i­s­a­tion) and TCP/IP (Transs­mis­sion Con­trol Protocol/​Internet Pro­to­col) net­work stacks, Eth­er­net LANs (Local Area Net­works), IP address­ing, Port num­bers, DNS (Domain Name Sys­tem), DHCP (Dynam­ic Host Con­fig­u­ra­tion Pro­to­col), and the prin­ci­ples of rout­ing between LANS and WANs (Wide Area Net­works).
• The dif­fer­ent types of net­work devices, routers and net­works switch­es, their rela­tion­ships to the stack mod­el and the use of fire­walls.
• The main com­po­nents with­in an IT Solu­tion includ­ing how hard­ware and soft­ware com­po­nents work togeth­er.
• The main com­po­nents of a com­put­er sys­tem and their pur­pos­es, includ­ing servers end-user com­put­ers, and mobile devices (both phys­i­cal and vir­tu­al, user inter­faces, CPUs, stor­age and con­nec­tiv­i­ty.
• The pur­pose of an Oper­at­ing Sys­tem.
• The con­cepts of Cloud, Cloud Ser­vices and stor­age.
• How their work con­tributes to busi­ness per­for­mance, con­ti­nu­ity and resilience.
• The main trends in emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies — includ­ing the Inter­net of things (IoT), arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and automa­tion — and the poten­tial impli­ca­tions for dig­i­tal activ­i­ties.
• The nec­es­sary numer­i­cal skills includ­ing Bina­ry and Hexa­dec­i­mal.
• Why cyber secu­ri­ty is essen­tial as park of the deliv­ery of any solu­tion.
• The impor­tance of work­ing secure­ly and the main clas­si­fi­ca­tions of types of threats and com­mon mit­i­ga­tion prac­tices.
• The mean­ing of risk in the con­text of secu­ri­ty and can explain the rela­tion­ship between lev­els or risk, impact , and designed lev­el of pro­tec­tion in IT Solu­tions.
• The role of con­fig­u­ra­tion man­age­ment and ver­sion con­trol sys­tems and when they should be used.
• The con­cepts of vir­tu­al­is­tion
• The use of dif­fer­ent plat­forms (includ­ing web, mobile or desk­top appli­ca­tions).
• The con­cept of rela­tion­al data­bas­es, non-rela­tion­al struc­tured and unstruc­tured data­bas­es.
• The con­cepts of solu­tions devel­op­ments to be giv­en set of require­ments, includ­ing the use of stan­dard approach­es for web and cloud-based solu­tions.
• The ben­e­fits of and require­ments for ven­dor sup­port includ­ing com­mer­i­cal cloud offer­ings.
• The prin­ci­ples of solu­tion Archi­tec­ture as applied to hard­ware.
• The advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of dif­fer­ent types of hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tions.
• The range of cabling and con­nec­tiv­i­ty
• The con­cepts of stan­dard builds
• The con­cepts of mobile data, Blue­tooth, 3G, 4G, WIFI and the secu­ri­ty impli­ca­tions of such solu­tions.
• Dif­fer­ent types of stor­age includ­ing local­ly attached, SAN (stor­age area net­work) and net­worked, and the con­cepts of RAID (Redun­dant Array of • Inde­pen­dent Discs) and knowl­edge of RAID lev­els.
• Require­ments when work­ing with Elec­tro sta­t­ic sen­si­tive equip­ment (includ­ing per­son­al ground­ing devices) and when work­ing in a serv­er room or data cen­tre and when han­dling equip­ment.
• How to install, con­fig­ure and test hard­ware com­po­nents, net­works and devices includ­ing servers, end-user com­put­ers and mobile devices.
• The need to fol­low a log­i­cal approach and how to ensure con­nec­tiv­i­ty with­in solutions. 

Under­pin­ning Skills, Atti­tudes and Behav­iours
• Work­ing pro­fes­sion­al­ly and inde­pen­dent­ly, tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty and ini­tia­tive as appro­pri­ate.
• Demon­strat­ing stan­dard busi­ness cour­te­sies and pro­fes­sion­al ethics in how you work
• Demon­strat­ing a pro­duc­tive and organ­ised approach to your work
• Work­ing effec­tive­ly with cus­tomers, clients and users. 

You will also com­plete a work-based port­fo­lio show­cas­ing the skills you have learnt on the course in a work-based envi­ron­ment, as well as an End-point assess­ment in the last 2 – 3 months of the pro­gramme — con­sist­ing of a syn­op­tic project under­tak­en in the class­room and an assess­ment interview. 

As an Appren­tice you will be expect­ed to attend col­lege 1 day a week as part of your ongo­ing 20% off-the-job train­ing. Addi­tion­al off-the-job train­ing hours are expect­ed to be com­plet­ed with­in the work­place, how­ev­er you may be asked to com­plete tasks at home via Google Class­room and One-file. 

Please note you may also be asked to com­plete addi­tion­al Eng­lish and Maths qual­i­fi­ca­tion as part of the Appren­tice­ship programme.