What is the most important soft skill and technical skill for IT professionals to have? I teach at a small community college and this info help me prepare classes in the future?
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IMHO, the most important thing to keep in mind in the IT field is that there's ALWAYS something new to learn. No one knows everything, so keep from acting like you have all of the answers. Even among the "experts", there are differences of opinion.
New Technologies are arriving everyday in the IT world. Keep abreast with with the hot spots and keep moving. This is what is relevant! Don't forget everything started from 0 and 1 now we are talking OOP. Have a nice day. Agbons David.
I think the language is most important part in which IT field is positioned, hence being yourself well equipped in popular language can really help one to grow and suceed...
particular for those on the helpdesk and absolutely for any providing phone support. Nothing hurts some much as explaining where the "any key" is for the 100th time or explaining for to the 30th person in a week that the reason they can't acces the network printer is that their password is expired and they need to change it, then explaining why passwords expire when they complain. "Yes, I set that policy. No, I won't give you a permanent password. And by the way, your password for the ERP system is not synchronized with your network password, so use the old password when logging in there. If you want them to be the same you'll need to change that one also." TjD
Please, Teach them to focus on the business side of IT. Teach them some basic economic skills and how to focus on the business benefits on the IT environment and how to calculate the cost of a break down. Teach them how to change an environment and test new, better whatever in a safe, minimum impact way. Teach them what their responsibility is and how mistakes can affect their company. Teach how to write and implement SLA in a meaningful way for different kind of organisations and how to stick to them. Teach them also the importance of documentation and how you should focus on the information needed, not the information available.
The technical stuff matters. A lot. Without it, IT doesn't work.
Everything else that you point out is also very important, but you need to understand that not all technical folks are *ever* going to care about it. The elements that you've outlined are more for business folks, not technical folks.
I believe that any IT student would be better served carrying a business minor along with their IT major. That way they'll be taught the right stuff in the right context, and (if they're any good) they'll be able to see the crossovers.
Writing / designing something someone else can read. It's amazing how many times the basic concept of communication gets dropped as soon as people(me included once upon a time) go into developer mode.
No one ever taught me this, I learnt wondering what idiot wrote this and then finding my name and a date from 6 months ago in the version header.
If you are not writing but configuring, documentation is not something you do if there's any budget left. In the real world if it isn't documented then it has n't been done until someone checks that it has (again).
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What Should I Teach?