Production Support Interview Preparation Guide

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Production support is the practices and disciplines of supporting the IT systems/applications which are currently being used by the end users.

A production support person is responsible for the receiving incidents and requests from the end users, analyzing these and either responding to end user with a solution or escalating it to the other IT teams. These teams may include developers, system engineers and database administrators.

This appears to be a simple question, yet it is easy to slip. I would suggest not mentioning money at this stage as you may come across as totally mercenary. If you are currently employed, you can say it is about developing your career and yourself as an individual.

This is probably the most asked question in a interview. It breaks the ice and gets you to talk about something you should be fairly comfortable with. Have something prepared that does not sound rehearsed. It is not about you telling your life story and quite frankly, the interviewer just is not interested.

This is not the arena for full disclosure. You want to stay positive and add a few specific statements or paraphrase. Something like "Joe Blogs always mentioned how reliable and hard working I was" is enough.

System security means preventing viruses and hackers from reaching the computer system. It is achieved by various strategies, like antivirus and firewall installation, crypting, restricting user online activity, etc. Another way to enhance security is to have system and data recovery means ready and up to date.

Degrees in subjects like IT, computer science, computer engineering. Moreover, the job often requires prior experience in support and customer service.

A combination of technological expertise and people skills. I am able to listen to a client, understand him/her and come up with a solution to the problem.

Not if production support specialists work alone. But in many cases the specialist either directs or is part of a support team. Within a team, the specialist is able to provide motivation and coordination.

We are using Apache 2.3 and Tomcat 5.6 by our application.