[SC.LUG] [Fwd: Help develop a qualification for technicians using Free Software

[George]

Richard Smedley wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 19:45 +0100, Geoff wrote: 
> Indeed - anyone looking to employ a young person to train
> up as a sysadmin has noticed the severe decline in IT awareness
> in the UK since the early to mid nineties :-/

I don't think it's so much that there's been a decline but rather that 
there's a lot more chaff prompted by ideas of high dotcom salaries and 
an idea that using MSN at home means they might quite enjoy a career in 
IT.

> Does anyone see much application of this for junior staff in
> their businesses?

No... but don't worry, no-one's yet been foolish enough to let me 
interview staff :)

Ideally, and I'm showing my biases here you ideally want to employ 
someone who is interested in the subject, is able to motivate themselves 
and can teach themselves from technical documentation.

So if you're having to send a new employee on a course to learn to 
"Identify running processes from the command line" you're implying that 
  you've employed someone who hasn't been interested enough (or able) to 
learn that kind of thing for themselves - and it's not like with Free 
Software there's anything preventing them from doing that at home.

On the other hand sending someone on a 2 or 3 day course that went into 
detail on *just* LTSP or *just* VOIP or, and this is possibly the most 
useful *just* replacing Windows file servers with Samba etc. then that 
might be a bit more useful.

George