I've been with the same company for 24 years and now manage IT across 11 locations in the UK, including large manufacturing and distribution sites plus several offices. We're talking about approximately 400 users—sales, office, and factory staff. As the only IT contact, I handle everything from infrastructure and security to project work, but not software development. I only have one trainee who I got two years ago because the stress was mounting. With 35 servers, including both virtual and physical, I am on call 24/6. My salary is £55k, which feels quite low for the workload. So, how many IT administrators or helpdesk staff should a company of this size realistically have?
3 Answers
Every situation is unique. I've worked in educational institutions with teams of 3 or 4 handling 150-200 staff and 500-1,000 students, and believe me, the demand was just as high. Given that IT is crucial for operations, a team of 4 or 5 seems about right for your user base too.
I think you're definitely under-staffed. In my company, there are about 300 users and we have a sys admin, a helpdesk person, plus a few developers. Your workload sounds quite heavy for one person, especially with 24/6 on-call duty. You might want to consider advocating for at least one more full-time staff!
It's tough to give a direct answer since it really depends on your specific setup and needs. Ideally, for a setup like yours, I’d suggest you should have around 4 to 5 IT staff to split the on-call duties and manage the workload reasonably. Just as a reference, in a previous job, our team had about 30 IT people for around 4,500 staff, mostly to support seasonal employees, while a larger company with about 5,000 staff had around 80. So it varies widely!
Exactly! Plus your team size can depend on the complexity of your systems. If you have many transactional processes, more staff is needed for effective support. It's not just about the number of users but what those users require from the IT team.
Agreed! Having a couple more hands on deck can make a huge difference, especially with everything you're handling.