We’re building a new tiered skill-rating system that will help us describe roles, expectations, and growth paths more clearly across the company. This survey is an early-stage test of that system.

The challenge we’re trying to solve has two parts. First, MSP work at PNC IT covers a wide range of domains—networking, endpoints, servers, Entra ID, backups, and more. We don’t want people getting siloed into one narrow specialty, but we also know it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to be equally strong in everything. We need a way to understand when someone is solid across the board as well as where they’ve developed deeper strengths.

Second, we have heard from you (and agree) that we need real structure around titles, salary bands, and promotion paths. Right now, we don’t have a framework that ties those things to actual skills or technical breadth. Without a shared way to describe someone’s abilities across different domains, it’s hard to build job levels that are fair, consistent, and meaningful.

This new tiered system is meant to solve both problems at once: give a clear picture of individual strengths and team-wide gaps, and give a skill-based foundation for role definitions and career growth.

We took inspiration from D&D stats and proficiencies: your "character" as a technician isn't defined by a single number, but by a spread of levels across multiple disciplines. We've started with what we see as the 4 core technical areas in our service: Networking, Endpoint, Server/Entra Id, and Backup. We hope to expand this to include things like customer service, automation, etc., but want to make sure we're going in the right direction.

What we need from you right now:

• Click the link in each section to view our description of the tiers for each domain
• Rank yourself and your peers as you see them
• (Optionally) give us feedback where you think we are being unclear, off-base, or where we are doing well.

This exercise is exploratory only. The tiers you assign will not be used for raises, promotions, performance decisions, or anything tied to your or anyone else's employment. We are asking you to include your name so that we can approach you with follow-up questions, and while we will share results with everyone, we will not identify who rated whom.

We are using this purely to see how you interpret the tiers, how consistently they are applied staff-wide, and what we need to fix or improve before we go live. If you have any doubts, questions, or reservations, please bring them up with Rich or with Rob before completing the form.

Please be honest, and don't overthink this. We want to make this system something that is useful for identifying and recognizing skills, helping you move up in your careers, and letting us all speak in the same language.