People with good job skills in PC, network and server administration are so scarce in my area, was wondering if this is happening everywhere?
My company pays well, and has terrific benifits and job security, and 10 years ago we had no problem finding skilled and motivated techs when we recruited.
I don’t like scoffing at people because of what they may lack in skills or ability, but I’m blown away at what some of the goofs made by our newer hires(people who have been with us from 1 month to 5 years).
Examples include:
We’ve written specific instructions that users must be in a certain group to use a secured network. Now, how long and how hard a task is it to add someone to a group? This secured network stayed “down” for a week because only some of the users were added, the three techs figured it must be the network was messed up.
We have an IT manager that makes pretty darned close to 6 figures over the networking and the pc support group. He attended meetings for weeks, and arranged a move of 30 pcs into a building, set a move date and had the pc techs hook everything up. Neither the pc techs or the manager could figure out why the users weren’t getting email until their boss asked about networking – they never let me know about the site so there was no switch or connection to our network, they were plugging into empty wall jacks. This guy was my boss mind you, and thinks networking is like electricity and every wall jack just works.
Another example, the pc techs had to install a driver on about 25 pcs. This driver, I know because I tried it, puts a big message box up warning you to install a hotfix. Gives the url and everything. This is 25 installs, 25 messages about the hotfix, and guess what? The computers bluescreened and rebooted because of no hotfix, and no one could imagine why.
Again I’m not writing this to scoff at people, when I made the move from comptuer operator to PC tech I goofed through my learning curve. But these people are hired because they are supposed to be techs already, and even after years go by some of them still do this kind of thing.
Is it just our hiring methods that are the problem or is there really a shortage of techs?