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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?
If two employees haven't been used effectively for the entirety of their careers, whose fault is that -- theirs, or management's? YOU owe THEM for sticking around through decades of shitty leadership.
People honest enough to admit their shortcomings, are probably quite able to tell where they can still be a good contribution. This late in the game, they must have ownership of their tasks, or they will hold everybody else up.
Sounds like they are well liked and have excellent people skills. Use that. 1st level help desk, training new employees, vendor contact, IT intranet, etc.
Look, it's very unlikely that senior admin staff has not bothered following the evolution of the IT hardware of its own company. Because, how can you actually do your job if it does not happen?
Maybe you have another situation on your hand, such as a team of people who were working on something else and have been relocated to admin. They're probably not super happy about it, too.
Then your job is probably not to retrain them (IT staff can train itself), but to remotivate them, if that is actually possible. How to do that, I don't know. There must be a way to give value to their experience (you don't seem to feel they have any but really you don't spend a full career in a company doing nothing), to put their current skills to good use. Assess those skills, find a way to put them to good use, and only then, think of how you can get them to fit the positions they've been relocated to. Maybe the problem will sort itself out when they realize their new position has moved away from punishment, to something exciting. IT people even old enjoy new challenges. It's just you have to get them into that mindset.
Cheers,
a manager
I'd relish a change - jobs like ours is very boring and monotonous and being required to learn something new and the having the luxury of learning on the job would thrill me to death.
And folks need to remember that aside from the fact that those folks aren't keeping up - it's now a performance issue - the EEOC is very easy to get around. And I once heard of someone who actually won an EEOC suite. They got a whole $50K to split with their lawyer - after 7 years of court battles.
Old farts like the above give us other old farts a bad name. Soylent Green them.
A thing with people that's often overlooked is that different people have different values. The main ones are
traditional authoritarian
individualistic achiever
egalitarian community
and systemic integrative [1]
For example, the traditional mindset is happy so long as there is a hierarchy which is dictating what needs doing, with a sense of loyalty and appreciation. So change for change's sake is not welcome, but change in the context of stability and loyalty, can be welcome. The core point is, safety and loyalty and conforming to the norms.
Whereas, the individualistic achiever is happier being able to do independently driven, the typical "modern thinker", the self-made man, etc. Here you might be more concerned with, asking people what do they want? Where do they want to go with this job? What are their interested? What do they personally want to develop? And then just letting them get on with developing any opportunity which appeals to them and which is useful for the company.
The egalitarian community type is motivated somewhat differently to the first two. This is anti-hierarchy and is looking more for meaning and purpose in the job. This person want to work for a charity which is devoted to a good humanitarian cause. They have a need for personal meaning and a sense of being equally valued as everyone else. Their own voice matters. The group is important, and so it is about helping people to voice their own experience and do so in a way which helps them relate to the group more, in a more meaningful way.
So that's three main "values" and there is one more crucial point: people's values change over decades. So you might find that, people who were happy in the same job doing the same standard thing for 30 years -- which would suit them if they were traditional authoritarian ie. they valued stability and being told what to do -- may by now be in the achiever value or the egalitarian value, simply because as individuals, they grew as people and now have new needs.
So part of retraining isn't just swapping out one set of work tasks for another -- that may be done perfectly well, yet kinda fail -- because as a person one may now wish for a different kind of expression of values in their work, and in their training.
Another way to out this is that as people grow they tend to become more complex and have more complex aspirations.
Actually my reason for writing this is that the article description suggests that the "problem" is how to deal with people who seem stuck in old patterns and unable to change... so I thought it worth mentioning that the people may have indeed changed... they have become more complex individuals, but the work itself hadn't changed... so the opportunity here is to tap into whatever new complexities these individuals may now be capable of. Older may well mean wiser.
Hire some entry-level admins who already know what you need. This will be cheaper over the long run.
It's people like you that are destroying our society.
Seriously, what did the company do during the last 10 years? No training?
I'm 65 and have skills with Linux, OpenBSD and OSX. I can set up nameservers and mailservers with OpenBSD and Linux. I have also been trained on industrial aircondition and installing fibreoptics. All due to industrial training and personal training.
What is up with that company management? Why have incentives for employees to learn and widen their skills been dropped years ago? Have the employees already been branded as "old" when they crossed the line of 40?
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
"basic network, Windows, Mac, Linux, and "cloud" first-level help desk support" is pretty wide and vague. Specifically, what kind of issues are they unable to address? First step would be to go over all the help desk tickets and see just what tickets come up most often that these employees need to be able to address. Then, start pinning down how to fix these issues under each OS, writing up comprehensive knowledge base articles as you go along. Use this as an opportunity to implement an actual knowledge base system, that can be used and expanded on by all your IT people.
My guess is tasks like updating network settings, adding printers, and troubleshooting permissions / domain credentials would be the major issues your helpdesk encounters. Make your knowledge base very specific, copy-n-paste type of instructions (especially if dealing with the command line). Utilize the fact that your Macs are somewhat POSIX compliant, so much of the training for Mac and Linux can be dual-use at least for "under the hood" items like I outlined.
You'll need some type of lab too, with machines that mimic your environment for them to train on. As for "the cloud", your vendor should be able to provide training for this. Since these people also know many other people in the org, leverage that as well. You should probably form a cross-sectional "advisory board" (borrowing from ITIL) that includes some users too to see what issues they commonly have that need to be addressed.
We had a not too similar situation when we decommissioned our old COBOL system. The developers were of more mature years (50+), but instead of just letting them go, they were moved into more of a BA role. They have a lot of domain knowledge built up from years of working on a monolithic system, it transferred quite well to doing business analysis and converting it into specs for devs on the new tech. They also had better people skills than green devs, which is rather important when trying to understand WTF the business wants or means
If you are a Journeyman in the field of IT, people don't train and update your knowledge, you do it for yourself. People who are good at this trade are also good at educating themselves and learning in general. People who aren't good at it might get a little better with training but they were probably not very good to begin with.
We'll make great pets
1) The company has to admit (some) responsibility for allowing this to happen. Why were these people not given training long ago when things started to shift? If they refused, why weren't they dealt with appropriately? Management done screwed up.
2) Get approval to terminate their employment if necessary. Otherwise, you may was well put a few reclining chairs in the lounge and ask them to nap through their shifts until retirement.
3) Give them a computer that meets the new standard, and give them standard tasks that the organization generally performs on that platform. Let them keep their old computer so they can google for help.
4) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard tasks completed. I'd start with "Spend a week on the new computer to familiarize yourself with the interface. Type up a report, fill out a spreadsheet, produce a presentation, browse the Internet, save your work on our cloud storage." Simplified versions of whatever the average user does, excluding any extremely specialized applications.
5) Give them standard IT tasks that you need performed on that platform. I'd give them a box and say, "Get this on the network". If they already know how to join something to a Windows domain, they already know a lot more than your summary suggests... or they're untrainable.
6) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard IT tasks completed. Don't hesitate to allow them to be mentored by whoever is doing this kind of work right now.
7) The tough bit - fire anyone who doesn't put in a decent effort.
Honestly, Mac and Linux aren't impossibly difficult to handle, but it is imposing when you have all sorts of MS-based assumptions about how things work and suddenly none of those assumptions apply. 'Cloud' is just a buzzword that for most purposes simply means you don't have physical control of the servers.
This is more about familiarization than training from scratch.
It sounds like they still have responsibilities that need done.
If they quit/retire/fired you have a hole. How do you address that hole?
Cross training, right? So do that.
Train the "old Mac" or "old Linux" IT to do their tasks and vice versa.
Don't discount the ability to build IT good will; that is a skillsets and resource you don't want to squander. Even if their tech responsibilities are down to pushing the imager button and rebooting PCs and checking cables, odds are they have mastered the art of keeping your users happy.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
"Old IT Workers". It is one more stereotype. There are weak "Young IT Workers" too.
For example, one may think that workers in advance age miss work due to illness more often than young workers. It is a stereotype too. The research shows the opposite.
It is due to such managers we have got cute baby-face puppets at about any office and counter who do not have a clue, who do not have any real life experience. And as a result the production goes away from Europe and the US.
I would start with the retraining course "Prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age" for this IT manager.
It sounds like they have loads of experience, but not practical skills for your current setup. Realistically if you were to train them to update their skills they would be just the same as any new (and potentially cheap) hire that you make - this isn't getting the best out of them.
No, what you want to do is take advantage of their experience. I'd be looking to shift their role, and only you can know what slots you have open, or where they may be able to contribute most. If they know everyone, then liasing between departments, IT and the users for example, may be good. They have probably got management skills which are under-utilised, and they will certainly be able to provide mentoring to new and inexperienced team members.
I'd start by talking your thinking through with them (individually) explaining the potential they have, and sounding out what they think they would like to do. You may find they have ideas which you haven't considered. If they want training up, then that is an option, but this is unlikely to be the best for the business.
You were hired to manage two guys who are on their way out. And you can't fire them.
Take that as a lesson in the organizational reality rather than your stated position.
You should consider that your position is not as secure as you think it is, and respond by turning these employees into niche superstars. Help them go out on their high note and you will give yourself a leg up.
They have internal cred. You are the new guy everyone 'above' is evaluating.
It's important to know that the administrative staff and others who hold goodwill toward these subordinates of yours could be your position's catapult, or it's anchor.
Talk to them. They should be aware that things have changed and they likely will tell you what they would do if they had to make department decisions. Just because they are older and supposedly stuck in yesteryear does not mean they are dumb and clueless. Training in specific areas is one good option as is finding them other tasks within the company. Maybe they had enough of helpdesk service and rather want to be more involved on the production side of things. Looking for QA? UX design? Report design? Tech writing? Something else? Make it easy for them to find a new purpose within the company.
By all means, don't fire them. They obviously did not get the attention and training years ago when the changes came into play. Should they have been more proactive? Maybe, but it could well be that prior management discouraged such engagement and ran with a "do as I say" culture. In any case, if they are just a few years away from retirement and generally have a good standing within the company let them come in and do whatever they think they can do. The perceived issue will go away in the near future, no reason to sour your relationship with folks long term.
Old workers in mid/large companies have one incredibly useful superpower: They know people and their quirks, and they know processes better than SAP and process managers combined (especially how those processes really run, not just what's on paper) and more importantly, they know how to bypass them. They know how to cut the red tape and who to talk to to get on the fastpass for resources. They can sit down with some other old fart in another department, have a cup of coffee and get a "free" test machine for you, they know the people who know where hardware is being hoarded that isn't used (and can be put to good use). And so on.
We had one such "old guy" in our team. His knowledge was dated and we mostly needed him for the ancient servers that we just couldn't turn off yet but aside of that, he was incredibly valuable whenever we needed something and couldn't go the formal way (or when we didn't have the time to wait for official channels to clear). When he retired, we lost our main source for "free" hardware, quick access and useful "connections" to other departments. He was also very useful in deadlocked meetings where he could take someone he knew personally from another department aside, ask for the real reason why they're stalling (or give him the hint why we have to) and they could hash out an "informal" solution together that both sides can work with. Saved us literally weeks of pointless meetings.
Yes, such people are poison and bane for process managers, but they're a boon for your department, especially if you're drowning in bureaucracy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Buy a Mac for each of these guys to use at home. Put the Linux distro you're using on the Mac in a VM. Task them with setting up the machine to run remotely on the corporate network under both OSs. They'll have fun learning, and will then be prepared to support others. The gift is also a nice way to reward them for their years of service.
If they couldn't be motivated professionally to learn Other-than-Windows distros which could have benefited them in their job, what the hell makes you think they're going to be motivated personally to learn it?
Sorry. No way in hell would I expend that kind of money and effort until I find out what the hell makes these codgers tick. I'd rather run a vulnerability scan across the network and prove to them that incompetence in maintaining every system properly will lead to disaster.
If they are close to retirement, the easiest and friendliest course might be to give them a buyout -- early retirement with a substantial bonus and a gold watch. Company politics may be against that, but you could make the case to management that they would be ahead over the next few years if they take this course, considering the new (and yes cheaper) talent that would replace them.
Fiat Lux.
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?
Seriously, what's the point?
It seems the point has been missed. The main point of this exercise is not to transform these two older workers. The point of this exercise is to see how well "new guy" manages them. If the older workers learn new skills useful to the company, that's just a bonus.
Yup. Also note that these people have "60 years combined experience" and have worked there for "their entire careers". Even allowing for a degree and some time looking for work, this means they're at the grand old age of... 55 at most?
Ooooooo 55, that's soooo old! That's not even a Baby Boomer, that's early Gen X.
I'm having difficulty with the entire premise of the question. I'm pretty sure 55 year olds can figure out their way around a Mac. Anyone that wasn't brought up on Unix might have problems with GNU/Linux systems, but TBH look at the threads on Slashdot concerning SystemD: A lot of people who have that experience are scared of pretty much any version of any distribution that's come out in the last few years because of change. Nonetheless, I think most get the hang of it.
My advice to the submitter: send them on some courses and give them some time to play around with whatever distribution of GNU/Linux your office uses. And stop being a patronizing git.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I doubt the article is about a real company, but let's pretend it is.
So you have these two guys that don't know anything but Windows desktop support, and now you want to train them to be admins for Linux servers?
I call bullshit. What is going on here is that you have Windows server and domain admins that don't want to learn Linux, so they're trying to escape that duty by dumping it on the Desktop guys.
You claim to be a medium size company. Are these two guys clearing their calls and keeping busy for 40+ hours a week or are they sitting on their butts all day? You did not say, but If they're putting in over 40, then adding Linux server support to their jobs means you're being a jerk. The correct thing to do is hire an another admin to manage the servers, or more likely, you need to make your server admins do their jobs.
The two desktop guys do indeed need to be able to do OSX desktop support, and probably smartphone email integration. You'll have to buy them each a OSX box and a book to learn, practice and troubleshoot.
Server admin job is a different job than desktop support (except in small business). It is a different mindset for the most part, and it's not a good idea to mix the roles.
Ya...I am very skeptical that these people had been there for 30 years each and didn't learn anything except installing drivers and Windows reinstall.
More likely the Tool that submitting the question has no real clue as to what they do.
"Reinstalling windows" Does he mean creating standard images that include the latest patches, implement company policies regarding installed software, access rights, etc and then loading that image on new computers and refreshing older computers? Not to mention periodic patching, etc.
Maybe these are the guys who people know they can call when something stops working. And when customers say they need help with X, these guys know what X is and know how to fix it.
Desktop support is the Red Headed stepchild of he information industry, but with out it, especially in a company with strict standards, you are doomed to be spending all your time addressing hose issues instead of your precious scripts trying to cram as much functionality as you can into one line of unsupportable code.
Ya... I be the submitter is just another asshole management puke who brings preconceptions and bias to his job.
In other words, a shitty manager.
I work for a major defense contractor. I mean big.
We had a guy that was here long before I arrived. He worked with the top level management and was very well regarded.
He did not re-install windows. He did not program. He did not configure switches, routers, or firewalls. He did not build computers, install servers, or anything else.
So what good was he?
He knew everyone who could do these things.
He knew all the policies and procedures and work flows.
He knew how all of these disciplines interacted.
He knew the right way to set up infrastructure for the best supportability and growth.
He knew how to get priorities changed to get support to your project.
If you had an outage of any kind and had 100 people on the manufacturing floor idle, he was the one you called. He coordinated all the disciplines and made sure the problem got resolved.
But he was an old guy who didn't have current skills, so what the fuck use was he, eh?
Maybe this new IT manager should sit down with management and find out why these two have such goodwill. Then talk to them and find out what they really do.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you're going to be pedantic at least try to be pedantic about something that matters.
If you are pedantic about something that matters, doesn't that mean you're no longer pedantic? Pedant, by its (not it's) very definition focuses on minor, unimportant details. That's like saying "If you're going to be a jerk, can't you at least be nice?"
This - sometimes people are unofficial IT project managers. The guys in TFA might just be a couple of losers, or they might be doing something useful every day. Certainly worth asking around.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I really wish this wasn't posted anonymously.
However, there's truth to both sides. I try to minimize the training required of me for my employers by staying (mostly) up-to-date on a variety of technologies. That being said, if the decision makers aren't communicating in a way that trickles down to us grunts, there's not much chance that I'll be self-training in a direction that's useful to them.
Having the initiative to update one's knowledge set is only useful if there is some guidance coming from 'up on high.'
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
I call that a project manager. He may not have the PMP, but he has been doing that job.
Might see if he'd night class it and make it happen, and offer a pay bump for doing it.
"real" project managers can keep projects from failing, thou there are a lot of paper ones out there.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
You don't want it anonymous so you can chase someone down ?
You need to "punish" the poster ?
The issue can be addressed without knee jerking into the blame game.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Why, is there a societal obligation
Because that's what society is for. I don't even want to explain my point to you. This world is going down, and if I have to explain to you why the above attitude of "everything that isn't optimal profit is bad" you're part of the problem. But it's way too late to change the minds of billions of brainwashed people. Fuck the revolution. Bring on the apocalypse.