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?

Comments

ask them

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

People Skills

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:People Skills

[Anonymous Coward]

IT people who don't tightly control what people do and can solve 99% of the problems that ordinary users have with their PCs? No wonder they're well liked.

Domain knowledge is sometimes more important

[MrDozR]

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

Re: What's the point? Here's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: What's the point? Here's the point

[sycodon]

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.