Have you tried rebooting?

Re-Training Technical Staff

// April 22nd, 2010 // Technical Know-It-All

“We have a new product and you need to get up to speed with it. Please make sure you learn it up”

Sound familiar? I suppose it is something that we get all the time as techies. I do understand that, we are paid to be techies because of our ability to grasp technical concepts and understand them easily. But sometimes, I feel managers should understand that technology is not generic. There is a significant difference between the skillsets of an IT Engineer and a NASA Engineer. Agreed?

While it may be possible for an application engineer to be a database engineer overnight, it is usually very very difficult. Even if they were to achieve it, they are usually not going to be as good as someone who has been working with databases all their lives.  It is becoming so common these days with the various mergers and acquisitions in the industry, that tech staff have been asked to learn various contrasting disciplines and given little time to get up to speed on it.

I always believe that in order to convince a customer to purchase your product, you will have to first know and believe in your product. Obviously, that is not the case. Tech staff are constantly blamed for not knowing the product well enough and not enabling the sales team to perform better.

Bottom line is this. Give your techies time to get there, and provide significant investments to get there. Do not expect to have your techies learn a new skill without providing training and equipment. You don’t get good at riding a bicycle without a bicycle now, do you? If speed is of essence, invest in a new headcount. Contrasting disciplines are not easily attainable overnight. For example, don’t expect a Storage Area Network (SAN) expert to be a Wide Area Network (WAN) in 1 week. The only thing common between them is the word “network”.

Horses for courses!