IT Service Desk Customer Service Apprentice
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
West Midlands (B15 2TT)
Closes in 13 days (Friday 20 March 2026)
Posted on 6 March 2026
Contents
Summary
This apprenticeship is focused on developing excellent customer service skills within a professional IT environment. The post holder will learn how to analyse and resolve a wide range of IT issues and service requests, supporting users via phone, live chat, our online portal and in person at the front desk.
- Wage
-
£21,733 a year
Check minimum wage rates (opens in new tab)
Rising to £27,166 per annum after 12 months service
- Training course
- Customer service specialist (level 3)
- Hours
-
Usually Monday - Friday
35 hours a week
- Start date
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Monday 18 May 2026
- Duration
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1 year 6 months
- Positions available
-
1
Work
Most of your apprenticeship is spent working. You’ll learn on the job by getting hands-on experience.
What you'll do at work
- Providing first line IT support to staff, students, and visitors, via all the Service Desk’s contact methods, developing the skills and confidence required to operate as a fully effective first line analyst.
- Gaining exposure to selected second line support activities as part of the apprenticeship, working alongside colleagues to develop an understanding of the full scope of IT Service Desk support.
- Ensure all user interactions are accurately recorded within the IT Service Management (ITSM) tool, maintaining complete and precise ticket documentation. Capture every contact and action taken, enabling effective handovers, consistent service delivery, and full visibility of previous activity.
- Identifying trends within recent and ongoing issues by monitoring incoming incident records and collaborating with colleagues.
- Utilising skills, experience, and documented knowledge to provide solutions to users for the majority of reported issues.
- Accurately triage more complex or time-consuming issues to other support teams, by building a thorough understanding of our services and support teams.
- Developing a broad understanding of the University’s organisational structure, business functions, strategic aims, and key stakeholders to accurately assess the impact of issues.
- Participating in ITIL-based Incident and Problem Management in line with documented processes.
- Updating the Status Page for system outages to keep the wider University informed and sharing updates in the collaboration channel.
- Being an advocate for our users proactively escalating issues where IT support is not meeting expected service levels to help ensure timely resolution and the delivery of excellent customer service.
- Contributing to the creation and maintenance of knowledge base articles, ensuring documentation is easy to follow, written in plain English and tailored to the correct audience.
- Any other duties that may reasonably be required in line with your position within IT Services or to help deliver excellent customer service.
- Supports equality and values diversity, moderates own behaviour to avoid unfair discriminatory impact or bias on others.
Where you'll work
Edgbaston
Birmingham
West Midlands
B15 2TT
Training
Apprenticeships include time away from working for specialist training. You’ll study to gain professional knowledge and skills.
Training provider
THE OPPORTUNITY PROVIDER LTD
Training course
Customer service specialist (level 3)
Understanding apprenticeship levels (opens in new tab)
What you'll learn
Course contents
- Business focused service delivery: Demonstrate a continuous improvement and future focussed approach to customer service delivery including decision making and providing recommendations or advice
- Business focused service delivery: Resolve complex issues by being able to choose from and successfully apply a wide range of approaches
- Business focused service delivery: Find solutions that meet your organisations needs as well as the customer requirements
- Providing a positive customer experience: Through advanced questioning, listening and summarising negotiate mutually beneficial outcomes
- Providing a positive customer experience: Manage challenging and complicated situations within your level of authority and make recommendations to enable and deliver change to service or strategy
- Providing a positive customer experience: Use clear explanations, provide options and solutions to influence and help customers make choices and agree next steps
- Providing a positive customer experience: Explore and interpret the customer experience to inform and influence achieving a positive result for customer satisfaction
- Providing a positive customer experience: Demonstrate a cost conscious mind-set when meeting customer and the business needs
- Providing a positive customer experience: Identifying where highs and lows of the customer journey produce a range of emotions in the customer
- Providing a positive customer experience: Use written and verbal communication to simplify and provide complex information in a way that supports positive customer outcome in the relevant format
- Working with customers/customer insights: Proactively gather customer feedback, through a variety of methods. Critically analyse, and evaluate the meaning, implication and facts and act upon it
- Working with customers/customer insights: Analyse your customer types, to identify or anticipate their potential needs and expectations when providing your service
- Customer Service performance: Maintain a positive relationship even when you are unable to deliver the customer’s expected outcome
- Customer Service performance: When managing referrals or escalations take into account historical interactions and challenges to determine next steps
- Service Improvement: Analyse the end to end service experience, seeking input from others where required, supporting development of solutions
- Service Improvement: Make recommendations based on your findings to enable improvement
- Service Improvement: Make recommendations and implement where possible, changes in line with new and relevant legislation, regulations and industry best practice
Training schedule
Requirements
Essential qualifications
GCSE in:
Desirable qualifications
A Level in:
Share if you have other relevant qualifications and industry experience. The apprenticeship can be adjusted to reflect what you already know.
Skills
- Communication skills
- IT skills
- Attention to detail
- Organisation skills
- Customer care skills
- Problem solving skills
- Presentation skills
- Administrative skills
- Number skills
- Analytical skills
- Logical
- Team working
- Creative
- Initiative
- Non judgemental
- Patience
About this employer
A world top 100 university and part of the prestigious Russell Group, the University of Birmingham makes important things happen. Delivering groundbreaking research and excellent research led teaching. People are at the heart of what we are and do. The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University. We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work. Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries. The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum, and botanical gardens.
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/ (opens in new tab)
Disability Confident
A fair proportion of interviews for this apprenticeship will be offered to applicants with a disability or long-term health condition. This includes non-visible disabilities and conditions.
You can choose to be considered for an interview under the Disability Confident scheme. You’ll need to meet the essential requirements to be considered for an interview.
After this apprenticeship
- Technical Support Analyst
- Desktop Support Specialist
- Team Leader
Ask a question
The contact for this apprenticeship is:
THE OPPORTUNITY PROVIDER LTD
apprenticeships@contacts.bham.ac.uk
The reference code for this apprenticeship is VAC2000019299.
Apply now
Closes in 13 days (Friday 20 March 2026)
After signing in, you’ll apply for this apprenticeship on the company's website.