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PHBs Getting "Secret" IT Training
An anonymous reader writes "As if all of us aren't already already aware of this, PHBs don't know jack squat about computer technology, and they won't seek any training from their own IT staff because that would be an admission of "weakness" so instead they are getting outsiders to train them in secret." Lucrative work for the secret tutors I s'pose. I guess getting tutored in secret is better than just floundering in ignorance.
I have seen the people that they hire when not in secret. Seriously, I had a guy in two weeks back to train me on my new I-series server. I helped him set it up then showed him how to connect to the internet, then I skipped the training in disgust.
Based primarily on the experience of one tutor, they imply that there is this vast underground of executives secretly trying to figure out their e-mail. Facts, people, I want facts! Show me more than one over-priced tutor, or even 10. Anonymous surveys, large industries, etc. That would be real news. Not some journalist interviewing someone they met at a party and calling it news. ++
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
You seem to be rather young and without a great deal of work experience, but with a great deal of (maybe justified) ego.
I was like you once. Then, I happened to marry a wonderful woman, a successful entrepreneur who had saved her money until she could start her own business, then struck out on her own. She was quite succesful, and not just because of the high quality of her products, which she designed herself and made in-house. She was that successful because she has great people skills and could teach those skills to her sales staff. There are other businesses whose product is as good as hers, but not so many who are as good at making customers *want* to buy from them over the others.
One day, fully cognizant of my BOFHier than thou approach, she bought me a copy of How To Win Friends and Influence people. It made all the difference.
For a number of years, I worked at a corporate-oriented ISP. Not all of our new sales people had experience in the ISP and networking fields. We hired good sales people, even if they'd never worked in our business before. It fell to the engineering dept. to help them learn what they needed to know. As I developed better people skills, I became *the* person in engineering that they would go to with questions, and they learned. Far more than to my boss, who was a brilliant engineer and sysadmin, but whose overly technical explanations often left non-tech people with more questions and no more comprehension than they had at the start.
Our best salesman was a guy who walked in the door knowing nothing about the computer business. He'd been in advertising sales before, and was good at it. He didn't stay ignorant. After a few months of talking mostly to me, he was not only the top-producing salesman, he knew more about networking than any of the others. He didn't know how data is encapsulated on a T-1 and I didn't try to tell him, but he sure knew what he needed to know to sell one, and he knew who to go to if he didn't have the answer.
Your career will go much more smoothly if you develop the people skills to go with your technical skills.
BTW, if you think academic and research environments aren't filled with at least as much politicking and ass-kissing as any corporate environment, You need to put down that crack pipe and get clean . Sorry, sometimes my old attitude comes back. Academic/research environments are just as bad, and often worse than, the corporate world when it comes to those things.