IT Technical Terms You Need to Know

Technical terminology and jargon are the lifeblood of many industries and separates the folks who know from those who don’t. Knowing technical terms allows you to speak with confidence and lets you into a select group of people. Having good technical term knowledge is like being familiar with a secret handshake—it opens doors and gets you access to areas you might not be able to visit otherwise.

This article dives into the IT waters and returns with critical technical terms that you need to know to make your time in IT easier. Knowing the terms we cover in this article will allow you to understand the issues and point you toward solutions. We look at many terms, including some buzzwords that hiring managers are looking to see and hear. 

Knowing IT technical terms is the first step toward a fruitful IT career, so let’s get started!

Customer-Facing Technical Terminology

The term Customer-Facing is itself a technical term meaning the abilities of employees to cooperate and coordinate on larger projects and business strategies while building relationships with customers. While you’ll encounter many soft skill terms that have made their way outside of the IT world, a majority of them got their start in Information Technology settings. IT talk is full of soft skill technical terms, and you’ll need to get familiar with them as part of your daily routine.

An excellent example of a customer-facing IT term is Crowdsourcing, which means to delegate tasks or duties to a larger group of people, often involving some sort of public involvement. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is another customer-facing IT technical term; it refers to policies and tools that businesses use to maintain good relationships with their client base and to respond to their needs. 

Meanwhile, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a technical term you’ll often hear in IT circles that refers to the level of client happiness.

IT Tools Technical Terms

Many of the most common technical terms you’ll hear when working in IT deal with the tools and policies you’ll use regularly. You’ll encounter plenty of terms that have big-picture implications in the information technology field, many of which have started to bleed over into the everyday lives of millions of non-IT folk. As IT becomes more important to modern living, its technical terms for policies and tools creep into everyday usage, so it’s a good idea to know what most of them mean.

You’ll often hear talk of Agile Development, which refers to software creation processes that require creativity and flexibility. Agile development involves simple code that gets rigorous testing and incremental releases. 

Another popular IT tool term is Big Data—this is a catchall term for the rapid rise of available information and what companies can do with it. Big data includes social media and search content and is invaluable for directing company policy. 

But perhaps the most widely used and least understood IT tool technical term is Cloud Computing. Cloud computing refers to information storage and retrieval that utilizes the Internet or a wide-area network.

And there you go, my beautiful friends. Knowing what IT people are talking about when they use technical jargon is essential to getting your career off the ground. We’ve let you in on some of the most popular IT technical terms so that you can make it in information technology and sound like a pro. Before you know it, you’ll be chatting about the Cloud and Big Data without batting an eye.