How to write a CV for an IT support technician role

What a hiring manager reads for first

Someone screening IT support CVs is usually trying to answer three questions fast: what tier have you worked at, what environment did you support, and what tools do you already know. They are not reading your personal statement. They are scanning for the words that match the advert — Active Directory, Intune, ServiceNow, tier 2 — because those words tell them how much retraining you need.

This means the top third of the page has to answer those three questions without making anyone hunt. If the advert says "supporting 400 users across two sites on Windows 11 and Entra ID," your CV needs to show, near the top, that you've done something comparable — not buried in a bullet six lines down under a job title from four years ago.

Tier matters more in this field than job title does, because titles are inconsistent between employers. "IT Support Technician," "Service Desk Analyst," and "1st Line Engineer" can mean the same job or very different ones. State the tier explicitly if you know it: "Tier 1/2 support, 350-seat environment" tells a screener more than the job title above it.

The qualifications that actually get checked, and the ones that don't

CompTIA A+ is still the closest thing this occupation has to an entry credential in a lot of job adverts, particularly for first roles. It signals hardware and OS fundamentals without needing a degree behind it. Network+ and Security+ sit above it and matter more as you move towards tier 2/3 or anything touching infrastructure.

ITIL Foundation gets asked for constantly, especially by larger organisations and anywhere with a formal service desk, because it means you already know the vocabulary — incident, problem, change, major incident — that their processes run on. If you have it, put the certificate number or badge status where it's visible, not just the name; some ATS scans and some human screeners check it against the issuing body's directory.

Microsoft's own certifications in this space have shifted around a lot — the old MD-100/MD-101 (Modern Desktop Administrator) path was retired and replaced, and what counts as current changes often enough that it's worth checking Microsoft's own certification pages before listing anything, rather than trusting what you were told when you sat the exam. List the certification and the year you got it; a screener who knows the space will read the date and draw their own conclusion about whether it's still relevant.

Beyond that, vendor-specific certs only help if they match the environment in the advert: Apple certifications (ACiT, ACSP) for organisations running a lot of macOS, a Cisco CCNA if the role touches switches and routers rather than pure desktop support. Don't list a cert that has nothing to do with the job — it reads as padding, not breadth.

On licences and registrations: this occupation doesn't have a statutory licensing body the way some trades do. What it does have, in the UK, is clearance. Public sector, defence, and NHS-adjacent IT support roles will often require a DBS check as standard, and government contracts frequently require SC clearance (occasionally DV for more sensitive work). If you already hold current clearance, say so and say which level — it can be the difference between shortlisted and not, because re-clearing someone is slow and expensive for the employer, and a candidate who already has it skips that entirely.

How to evidence experience so it isn't just a list of duties

The single most common failure on IT support CVs is writing what the job involved instead of what you did in it. "Responsible for resolving IT issues for staff" is true of every service desk technician who has ever worked. It gives a screener nothing to compare you against.

What this field actually measures, and what your CV should therefore mention, is ticket-based: volume handled, resolution time, first-contact resolution rate, SLA compliance. You don't need exact figures from an old employer's dashboard if you don't have access to them any more, but you should be able to say something like "handled 40-60 tickets weekly via ServiceNow, maintaining SLA compliance above target" or "reduced average resolution time on password/access tickets by streamlining the AD reset process." If you genuinely don't know a number, describe the mechanism instead — what you built, fixed, or changed — rather than inventing a percentage to fill the gap.

Name the ticketing system. ServiceNow, Zendesk, Freshservice, Jira Service Management, and Cherwell are all different enough in how they're configured and used that naming yours tells a screener something real, and its absence is noticeable — an IT support CV with no ticketing platform named anywhere looks like it's missing a chapter.

Name the environment specifics too: Windows 11 or macOS, Active Directory or Entra ID (Azure AD), Group Policy, Intune or SCCM for device management, imaging processes if you've built them, VPN and MFA troubleshooting, VoIP systems if you've supported them. "Deskside support" and "remote support" are different skill sets and different tooling (TeamViewer, AnyDesk, BeyondTrust/Bomgar) — say which you did, and for how many sites or how many users, because scale changes what the job actually was.

If you've done any project work alongside break-fix — a Windows 10 to 11 migration, an office move, an onboarding process you built — put it on the CV as a separate line, even briefly. It's evidence you can work beyond the ticket queue, which is what gets people considered for tier 2/3 or team lead roles.

What candidates from this background routinely leave out

The most common omission is scale. "Provided IT support" says nothing. "Provided IT support for 200 users across 3 sites" says a lot, and it costs one extra clause.

The second is the split between hardware and software work. A lot of IT support CVs read as entirely software-side — password resets, account setup, software troubleshooting — when the candidate has also done hardware diagnostics, printer and network troubleshooting, asset tagging, and stock management. If you've touched physical kit, say so; some roles are weighted heavily towards it and a CV that reads as purely helpdesk software work will get filtered out even from someone who's done both.

The third is soft-skill evidence that isn't generic. "Excellent communication skills" is meaningless on its own. "Explained technical issues to non-technical staff, including senior leadership, without jargon" is specific to what this job actually requires day to day — dealing with someone who is frustrated, non-technical, and wants their problem gone, not an explanation of DNS.

The fourth is out-of-hours or on-call experience, if you have it. Some service desks run shift patterns or on-call rotas, and stating you've done this — and handled major incidents outside normal hours — answers a question the employer would otherwise have to ask at interview.

Last, and this one is subtle: candidates often don't distinguish between fixing a ticket and closing it properly, i.e. documenting the resolution. Employers running formal ITIL processes care about knowledge base contributions and documentation, because that's how a service desk scales. If you've written or updated knowledge base articles, or built runbooks, mention it — it signals you understand the job is not just the fix, it's making the fix repeatable for someone else.

What to do next

Pull the advert you actually want and check your CV's top third against its first few requirements — tier, environment, ticketing system, named tools. If they're not visible in the first screen of the page, move them up.

Then go through your bullet points and replace every "responsible for" with what you actually did: the ticket volume, the resolution rate, the system, the number of users. Where you don't have a number, describe the mechanism instead of guessing one.

If you're applying to enough roles that this rewrite-per-advert becomes the bottleneck rather than the writing itself, jobmarket.pro reads each advert in full and builds the application from one fixed profile of your actual experience, without inventing anything into it.