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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way to Retrain Old IT Workers?
A medium-sized company just hired a new IT manager who wants advice from the Slashdot community about their two remaining IT "gofers":
These people have literally been here their entire "careers" and are now near retirement. Quite honestly, they do not have any experience other than reinstalling Windows, binding something to the domain and the occasional driver installation -- and are more than willing to admit this. Given many people are now using Macs and most servers/workstations are running Linux, they have literally lost complete control over the company, with most of these machines sitting around completely unmanaged.
Firing these people is nearly impossible. (They have a lot of goodwill within other departments, and they have quite literally worked there for more than 60 years combined.) So I've been tasked with attempting to retrain these people in the next six months. Given they still have to do work (imaging computers and fixing basic issues), what are the best ways of retraining them into basic network, Windows, Mac, Linux, and "cloud" first-level help desk support?
Monster_user had some suggestions -- for example, "Don't overtrain. Select and target areas where they will be able to provide a strong impact." Any other good advice?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way to retrain old IT workers?
Firing these people is nearly impossible. (They have a lot of goodwill within other departments, and they have quite literally worked there for more than 60 years combined.) So I've been tasked with attempting to retrain these people in the next six months. Given they still have to do work (imaging computers and fixing basic issues), what are the best ways of retraining them into basic network, Windows, Mac, Linux, and "cloud" first-level help desk support?
Monster_user had some suggestions -- for example, "Don't overtrain. Select and target areas where they will be able to provide a strong impact." Any other good advice?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way to retrain old IT workers?
What I would do is to give them a machine, park it on their desks and get them to install Linux on it. Tell them you want them to install and configure something that will be of use to you running on Linux. There must be something your department is missing that is sorely needed that they can get going, and at the same time pick up some skills in configuring Linux and installing software, patching, maintaining, backing up, monitoring etc. It's important that you don't give them artificial problems to solve - it needs to be real, and useful if they get it working well so there is real payback for this investment in time. Perhaps a web service like a CMDB, or a knowledge base - install Apache, Samba etc.
.. or let them use their imaginations.
Perhaps there is a production service that you want monitored; they could install Zabbix as a service, and then get them to install the agents on servers, produce the dashboard, monitor it daily and identify and fix issues that are shown up.
Perhaps you need a backup service for all of your desktop machines. Get them to install Amanda as a backup server. Install a tape drive, create a backup regimen.
Get them to install some virtualisation software - build a test model of a production service with the same software levels where you can test changes &c.
AND get them to document everything, coz when they go you will want them to hand it over to someone else as an easily maintained service. If it sticks, and they get enthused, then let them do some simple changes on the production services, and so on. If the only cost to you is to move some existing machine that isn't being used elsewhere, and all of the software is free as in beer, what harm could it do? Give them two machines each, get them to set up clustering, HA, PostGreSQL running in an active/active configuration
I am at this age. There are skills in demand which I've not invested time and training in, and which it would take me years to become comfortable enough to contribute in any notable way. (.NET, anyone?) This is partly due to age: I'm not as adept at learning new skills with enthusiasm as I was decades ago. It's also partly due to a great deal of crystallized knowledge of other systems that have different structure, and requirements. So I don't take leadership on bringing in those newer technologies.
In the position of those staff, I'd appreciate your speaking to _me_, not just to Slashdot. Do they want to retrain? Does it excite them? If they're accustomed to "Adding Windows users" and other rote tasks, are they interested in learning PowerShell to automate their old tasks? If the company is large, can they learn PXE activation for Linux style deployments? With their experience, can they learn security or firewall management work?
I believe the quote you are looking for is this one: "Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance." -- David Mamet