The five most popular MSP job titles and their descriptions
Running a profitable MSP means having the right specialized staff. With IT, there is a slew of job titles at play, both legacy and new, and having the right team on hand is a combination of several factors:
Have precise job descriptions and requirements
Correctly allocating staff according to your services
Have clear role hierarchy/seniority paths
Understand the revenue-generating potential of each role
In this article, we’ll focus on the first step to finding and hiring the right staff: identifying essential job titles and going through the descriptions of each.
Service desk dispatcher
Level: ≥ 2 years similar experience
Salary range: $42,000 - $55,000
Staffing needs: 1 per 5-7 technicians
Skills: Excellent communication and time management. Ability to coordinate many different schedules and manage available resources.
Description: A service desk dispatcher will be one of the first roles you want to fill as you expand your staff. Generally, when you are approaching four or more technicians on staff, you will need a dispatcher to maintain the structure of your service delivery.
Service desk dispatchers operate as a supervisor and coordinator role, helping to keep your technicians focused on the right task while managing the overall service delivery resources at your disposal.
A service desk dispatcher will manage service tickets and requests and see that they are appropriately escalated to the appropriate technician, whether a service desk technician or a field technician. They help your business maximize billable hours by keeping technicians busy and focused on closing tickets.
Field technician
Level: Can range from entry to mid-level based on specializations, certifications, and experience. Often there are Tier 1 and Tier 2 technicians for escalation.
Salary range: $45,000 - $63,000
Staffing needs: 1 technician per 200 to 250 managed endpoints
Description: Your field technicians are the traditional, boots-on-the-ground IT support. Your field technicians are the answer when things are beyond remote fixing and require a human on-premise to fix or manage.
A lot of what we consider “traditional” IT support falls into the specialization of these staff members. They help customers with everything from structured cabling and hardware provisioning to recovering bricked hard drives.
Naturally, this encompasses a lot of work so that field technicians will make up a large portion of your staff. A good number to aim for is one technician to 200 or so managed endpoints. This number holds pretty stably for SMBs to enterprise operations.
So what are some certifications and specializations that would help your MSP’s portfolio?
Certified network computer technician
CompTIA+
Virtualization certifications (VMware, Microsoft, Cisco, etc.)
Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.)
Service desk manager
Level: Mid-level managerial, 4+ years IT experience
Salary range: $85,000 - $125,000
Staffing needs: 1 per location, or 1 per 50 or so service desk technicians.
Description: Service Desk Managers are in charge of auditing, optimizing, and training your service delivery. Which, in essence, is the powerhouse of any MSPs revenue.
For some smaller outfits, a Service Desk Manager can also be a leader in developing the overall service desk tactics. Still, tasks like that can fall into a director’s role for larger organizations.
Service desk managers are the individuals who help you maximize your overall billable hours by leading your technicians in applying advanced strategies to deliver outstanding services fast and at scale.
These individuals are the point-person of your technician teams, helping to onboard and train your technicians and consistently assess and improve workflows.
It’s a vital job to any MSP, and it is imperative to have the right service desk manager as you scale up your team. The right person in this role can smooth out growing pains and help your business maintain happy clients.
Help desk technician
Level: Can range from entry to mid-level based on specializations, certifications, and experience. Often there are Tier 1 and Tier 2 technicians for escalation.
Salary range: $35,000 - $65,000
Staffing needs: 1 technician per 70 end-users
Description: Help desk technicians, also called support technicians and remote support technicians, are often the first touchpoints for clients experiencing technical difficulties.
These are your frontline customer support specialists. Often, the job requires working alongside clients to identify issues and promptly resolve them, so the right combination of people skills, communication, and technical skills is necessary.
This is a position that should have room for specialization and escalation. For example, specific problems—an AWS remote desktop not loading correctly—require a technician to have the right skills to fix. Other issues may be identified as beyond the skill or experience of a tier 1 technician and need to be escalated to a 2 tier technician for a quick resolution.
Alongside field technicians, help desk technicians are the staff with the most direct output-to-revenue impact. This means having the right amount of technicians for your client load and the right specialists for your service stack.
Cybersecurity specialist
Level: Mid-level or higher. Requires specific certifications and experience
Salary range: $75,000 - $130,000
Staffing needs: Dependant on service offering
Description: Cybersecurity has been a booming concern to businesses for years now. Naturally, MSPs have adapted by offering varying levels of cybersecurity management, ranging from baseline updates and patching management to full-blown Security Operations Centers.
The needs of this position can vary primarily based on your service offering and clientele. If you’re an MSP that offers a simple baseline of cybersecurity services, having one cybersecurity specialist on staff can often get the job done. If you’re an MSSP with a significant focus on cybersecurity, you may want every help desk technician to have the skill set of a cybersecurity specialist.
The role's requirements are focused on anything cybersecurity-related, which covers a lot of ground. Some baseline skills that a cybersecurity specialist should have include:
Penetration testing
Training and education
Cybersecurity forensics
Remote monitoring
Permission structuring and management
Vulnerability and risk assessment
Hardware and software security strategies
What makes this such a popular role? Its importance is only growing. There are more and more cybersecurity expectations placed on MSPs, and the threat vector presented by IT is booming at a pace that few businesses want to keep up with internally. Having the right cybersecurity specialists on staff can give you some of the best ROI your business will see.
