I think I lack computer skills to do my job well
That's after decades as an IT professional. I can think of probably no more than a dozen people I've worked with over those decades had the skills to do their jobs well either.
Nearly a third of Britons don't think they have the required computer skills to do their jobs despite 9 in 10 households having internet access, according to the Office for National Statistics. The government numbers agency's latest survey also reckons that 16 to 24-year-olds are the most likely group to be using cloud storage …
That's after decades as an IT professional.
I'd go along with that. Today I've been trying to solve problem in a couple of areas which I've been working with of over 20 years.
Almost 1 in 3 Brits think they lack computer skills to do their jobs well
Meanwhile the other 2 thirds are deluded, they don't know enough to know what they're missing out on.
@"Meanwhile the other 2 thirds are deluded, they don't know enough to know what they're missing out on."
Yeah you keep telling yourself that.
Most problems have many possible solutions but not everyone is able or willing to implement them. Doubly so in computing.
I won't offer advice as you will reply "but what about" or "I can't do that because" when all you really need to know is, if it both possible and desirable why haven't you done it, perhaps you are the problem rather than everyone else.
Most problems have many possible solutions but not everyone is able or willing to implement them. Doubly so in computing.
It's usually not down to 'everyone able or willing' but to what solution including 'trendy new buzzword, like it's the second-coming and the only possible solution' which the management have their heart set on like kids having seen a toy advert before Xmas.
I am proud to lack certain computer skills, such as proficiency with Microsoft Office
Interesting that you should quote MS Office - I cut my teeth on Wordstar and early Excel, and I appreciated simplicity of the software and the fact that it actually enabled me to get the job done. Fast-forward to the bloatware that claims to be Office and we both know why we'll never be proficient at it.
This sums up the problem nicely ... http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm
89 per cent of Brit households had internet access, a figure that was flat year-on-year – and one which may have the architects of the UK's universal service obligation scratching their heads about getting the last 10 per cent online.
I'm usually taking the mickey when I use that subject line, but here I'm not. Surely the figure will increase above 89% as the 70 and 80 year olds who have never used computers drop off their perches, and nearly everyone who is alive will have had some computer experience?
Another report on these ONS figures, in the Guardian, is trumpeting the fact that the number of folks over 65 who make online purchases has risen by 16% in the last 10 years. Uh yes - possibly because a decade ago these people were 10 years younger...
Re: Just wait until all the old people die off
"Not to worry, the NHS will see to that"
The *underfunded* NHS will carry on doing its best for all of us as long as it's permitted.
you mean the worlds 5th largest employer getting funding of nearly £4000 per second *underfunded*
The NHS employs 1.7 million people across the UK. It is the country’s biggest employer and ranks at number five globally
Planned spending for the Department of Health in England is approximately £123.7 billion in 2017/18
>you mean the worlds 5th largest employer getting funding of nearly £4000 per second *underfunded*
The NHS employs 1.7 million people across the UK. It is the country’s biggest employer and ranks at number five globally
Planned spending for the Department of Health in England is approximately £123.7 billion in 2017/18<
So? It's still underfunded, even if the numbers do look scary to those who don't understand them. If you look at what the NHS does with that money, the outcomes it achieves, etc, it's still the most efficient healthcare system in the world. It would be more efficient still if this government didn't keep making 'efficiency savings' which actually make it LESS efficient...
I assume you favour an insurance based system like the USA? Where (like any insurance policy) they avoid paying out for anything they can wriggle out of, won't cover pre-existing conditions, & have limits on how long treatment can be funded? Most times that they do pay out they don't cover all the cost, and the patient has to cover some/most of it themselves. Healthcare-related debt is the most common cause of bankruptcy in the US - and still costs more per head than the NHS
> Surely the figure will increase
I don't think it's age/ability... I think this reflects people that just can't afford broadband. I don't know about you guys, but it's a chunk 'o change on this side of the pond, usually about $50+ a month even for SuperShittySpeed.
11% sounds about right for "na, mate, can't afford it"
"I think this reflects people that just can't afford broadband."
back when internet access was via services like Compuserve and AOL, who charged a flat fee of about £20 per month, plus you still had to pay 1p per minute off peak for the phone call on a 14400 modem, internet WAS expensive.
My dad was in the pub and was talking to a few people about using the internet and the information that was available online. When it cam to the issue of cost there was the inevitable face of shock and horror. But my dad put it in terms that they could understand, just as the bell rang for last orders.
he pointed out to one particular person who came in the pub every night for a few beers and a couple of whiskey chasers, that at last orders when he ordered two pints and two chasers, that if they just ordered the one pint and one chaser that it would more than cover the cost of the internet each month.
in comparison, internet access is so much cheaper these days.....
"but it's a chunk 'o change on this side of the pond, usually about $50+ a month even for SuperShittySpeed.""
Based on the current exchange rate, that's about the price here on the right side of the pond for a decently average to above average speed. SuperShittySpeed is probably more like the equivalent of $10, or even as a "free" add-on with phone+cable/Sat TV. This may depend on what is being compared of course. xDSL cost is on top of phone line rental.
I'm usually taking the mickey when I use that subject line, but here I'm not. Surely the figure will increase above 89% as the 70 and 80 year olds who have never used computers drop off their perches, and nearly everyone who is alive will have had some computer experience?
It would be interesting to see the break down on age groups of the refusniks. You're probably right that it's higher for the elderly, but then again my mother first used a PC in her mid-eighties.
Perhaps it's reasonable to expect that ~10% of the population just doesn't care about computers. We've never reached 100% ownership for TVs for example, plenty of people who could easily afford one just never saw the point, why should Internet access be any different.
I'm usually taking the mickey when I use that subject line, but here I'm not. Surely the figure will increase above 89% as the 70 and 80 year olds who have never used computers drop off their perches, and nearly everyone who is alive will have had some computer experience?
Is going from not using a computer to using a computer badly an improvement?
Is going from not using a computer to using a computer badly an improvement?
No.
I think of my parents, in their 80s, who have a computer and broadband. It's scary to think how non-proficient they are in ALL OF IT. Basic ITsec and data protection they don't have a clue about. The conventions and risks of using social media are beyond them (they really think that all forms of online discussion are like a friendly chat with friends in your own front room). They don't even have any idea of the difference between the hardware, OS, applications, online services, wifi, or ISP connectivity. Despite my best efforts, I worry that they are the sort of people who fall for phone/IT scams.
In my view, the best thing for them would have been if they'd never had access to an internet connected computer.
Surely the figure will increase above 89% as the 70 and 80 year olds who have never used computers drop off their perches, and nearly everyone who is alive will have had some computer experience?
The problem with that line of thinking is that it assumes that having had exposure to computers during a working lifetime, retirees will wish to continue said exposure in retirement. I'm not sure I've seen any evidence for that, which is why I've labelled it an assumption.
It's because the programs and services that are for entertainment and shopping; i.e. things that companies want you to use are tested and refined to make sure that they're relatively pleasant and easy to deal with.
The programs that are for work - the time-tracking software, the inventory management system, the invoice filing cloud service; i.e. things that companies know you need to use for contract or regulatory reasons are only tested just enough to make sure they don't crash too hard.
Edit: I can see someone here works for BigTime.
Oh jeez that's so true. Some of the stuff I deal with at work (HR, payroll and recruitment systems) are Gordian in their complexity and I don't believe could have been more badly designed if the developers had actually planned them to be so utterly shite.
No wonder people get so mad when Netflix etc are so easy to use and so good at extracting cash from us and work stuff is so timesappingly souldestroyingly awful. The banks are a standout. Their stuff is customer focussed and utterly shite.
They must be average since they are not feeling confident in their ability then they are probably not a complete amatur nor an expert. This is a fair assessment of most people generally and if you are in the younger group its also reasonable since you don't have experience yet. Seems like the normal course of things and not a problem.
It applies to me. I'm shit at my job and I can't believe I've been getting away with it all these years.
Some of the stuff I do is so damn easy that I can't believe they pay me a good salary for it.
That's how it feels to me. Other people seem to value my work though.
It does not surprise me in the slightest that people are sh1t with computers.
For arguments sake (only) it was 1998 that computers really became main stream in offices. 20 years later I know of office workers who have used Excel for 20 years and have No Idea what to do with it e.g. drag and fill in columns, they just copy and paste into another spreadsheet. When you have no endeavour to learn what hope does business/deparments have.
As for school leaver....I had two work place experience pupils and I asked them what coding they did. The reply was "oh we have done a power point presentation" (I am not laying blame on anyone). So I scaled down what I was going to show them and then got them to do the work i.e. some SSIS and basic SQL.
They did this with some guidance and error resolution. At the end of the work experience they turned round to me and said "is this all you do", note they were only there for one day.
Haha you cannot win and it looks like I have turned two up and coming individuals off tech.
So, I feel kind off safe in my job knowing that there is not that many people in the work place wanting to get their hands dirty with code.
99% of companies issue their end users with IT kit without any sort of training on how to use it. I have only ever once witnessed an instance where training was mandatory, each user had to sit with a trainer going through the new features of windows and office. If all companies did this then us support staff would have little to do. There are numerous times i have been asked by a user who has logged a fault because they can't do the simplest of things such as printing, connecting a projector saving a file, creating an email signature, etc.
There is indeed a simple reason, it is that some people are employed to be availible to connected things together and show users how to do simple things.
This is indeed training for those that want it and I would say far superior to some business tool standing at the front of a class of disinterested employees giving a lecture on a subject he picked up five minutes ago and has never actually used in practice. Training by support is targetted to the needs of the business, when it needs them rather than the alternative where some manager who doesn't know how to spot a BSer from the real thing, buys in business training without regard for staff needs months apart from where they actually need it.
Training by support is cheap, effective and helps mitigate the constant HR fails, so do not knock those people who cannot be bothered to learn your "simplest things" because without them you would be out of a job, pal.
"Training by support is cheap, effective and helps mitigate the constant HR fails, so do not knock those people who cannot be bothered to learn your "simplest things" because without them you would be out of a job, pal."
The problem with doing "training" as you describe it, is that most of those calling support never learn anything because they have "problem" and need to get their ob done, often as a matter of urgency (because they just spent ages trying to figure it out for themselves) so all they want is a fast "press this, click that, type the other" solution and don't spend any time understanding or memorising the solution. S/He will be back on the phone next week with a similar or the same problem again.
The other way of cheaping out on training is to offer on-line training. Most of the times I've done it, there's no way to self-pace properly (much of it seems to be video based) and there's little to reinforcement or structured building on previous concepts. Each section or module is fully self-contained, often with an unattributed short test at the end. By the time you've reached the end, much of what you "learned" at the start is a haze and about half of the rest is irrelevant to your job so the final exam ends up becoming a lottery.
I'm sure everyone here has done the mandatory H&S type online courses and now knows how to safely lift an HP Laserjet I or a large Ricoh Fax Machine safely and anyone who might need to use a ladder once every year or so is now confident of assessing the safety of a weak roof and in the use of a cherry picker
Ha!
Just a couple of days ago I was called by my neighbour who works for the council from home. "I can't find the file I saved earlier!"
- Ok, go through what you did to save it.
+ Opens email, opens document in email, modifies document, selects Save, dialogue opens to Temporary Internet Files.
- Ok, when did you save it?
+ Yesterday
- You see that name "Temporary", that means "temporary" as in not permanant, as in everything gets deleted in there from time to time, usually when you log off. You shouldn't save things there, you should be saving in My Documents or somewhere. Here, do that again and here, click there and there to save in your Documents.
a bit of practise, and time passes...
+ So how do I find that file then?
- Go to your Documents, how do you do that on here? Try that Start button, ok there: 'Documents'.
+ But where is it?
- Well, that's just the first ten entries, they're all directories, try scrolling down to find the files, scroll down, no down, no, click there and, no! not there, scroll, see that thing there, it's called a scroll bar, scroll it by, no! stop!, let me!, like this!
Scrolls on forever, more than 500+ files in Documents.
- You really should organise things in subdirectories.
+ Oh, that's too difficult
My wife did that exact same thing (open doc from email and just clicked save) when in a internet cafe!
When asking "support" i.e. the clueless (or maybe just unhelpful) oik there for help finding it she got the brush off and had a row with them.
Eventually she calls me (still sobbing from the row). Obviously Explorer was locked down, I had to talk her though opening a document from email then using the Save As ("No don't click save.", "Oh?, I did", "OK, try again") to get a file dialog and using that as a cheat file explorer to copy the document she saved in temp to her USB.
I have been working in IT for 30+ years, and the majority of people I interact with have barely any computer skills at all, even if it is part of their job. Even the people who work in tech support are often scarily ignorant and the complete ignorance when it comes to security, passwords etc is still why so many companies and websites get hacked.
No matter how bad I have told a client their security is, and how easily they could be hacked or infected with malware, they do not care and have no interest at all in resolving the situation.
The average person these days seems even less IT literate than they were 20 years ago. A large proportion of the population do not even own a computer and only knows how to press LIKE and SHARE on their phone. They do not know what copy and paste means and are completely stuck when unable to share something in a closed group.
The ITC training in schools seems to be wholly inadequate. I taught my kids the very basics of how to use a computer, and all of them are the school experts and know more than the teachers and often have to show the teachers what to do.
... then your manager has failed and needs either retraining or firing. Because it's their job to make sure that this is not the case. That's, like, literally the most important thing they're paid to do.
And they're paid more than you, which means their fuckup is bigger than yours.
What do people understand by the phrasing "do their jobs well"? Everyone imagines that a computer system can be super-efficient, one-button no-errors all-singing Dolby-surround digital perfection. Now, we hardened veterans know it's never (ever, ever) like that, nor likely to be - but at least one-third of all people imagine that it should be, and then blame themselves when errors happen.
When the fact is, the interface/app they're using is likely so shite that unless you perform steps A through J in the correct order and at the right time (which you have no way of telling, and neither does anyone else because it's undocumented and probably, frankly, completely untested...) - it will go wrong.
If you're lucky, it will go wrong in some obvious way, but many people are so deluded that they actually see this as a failure, rather than designed and intended behaviour.
TL;DR: if your job requires you to have skills you don't, in fact, have, then it's the job that's badly designed. Not you.
This XKCD also seems appropriate.
Your training needs should be picked up in your 1-to-1. Ah, but, because: computer, it's IT not HR that need to sort it out
The processes you have to do as part of your job are supported by IT, not dictated by. If you're adding "XXXX" into a compulsory field or "don't send to this address" in Line 1 of an address field you're breaking your data/processes, IT doesn't care :)
....and it's not as rare as you think to be discussing a business process with someone and they say; "I just want one button to press" [to do the entirety of my job and effectively make me redundant]
If you lack the IT skills necessary to do your job...
... then your manager has failed and needs either retraining or firing. Because it's their job to make sure that this is not the case.
There's a wonderful little concept, not very popular these days, but one can only hope it will return to the fold sooner rather than later, known as personal responsibility.
My skills are no reflection of my managers (collective throughout my career) at all. They are reflective of my taking personal responsibility to ensure that I am as good or better than everyone I work with, and that my skills remain current with the wider marketplace.
The only job security anyone ever really has is their ability to attract another employer quickly if anything happens to the current role. I take responsibility for ensuring I can walk into several jobs at very little notice, which is why I get paid in what may be politely termed the premium segment.
Your skill set is your job, not your managers. His/her job is to replace you with someone better if you don't maintain an effective skill level. Sorry, but that is the really real world out there: get your game face on.
I find this comment interesting
"The ... survey also reckons that 16 to 24-year-olds are the most likely group to be using cloud storage services"
By this do they mean that 16 to 24 year olds subscribe to a cloud storage system like Amazon's or that they just store their photos / music (automatically) online in iCloud / Google's / Microsoft's version? In other words do they use cloud services through choice or by default? Are mail servers considered cloud storage or not because if they are then surely practically everyone stores data in the cloud if they are using IMAP?
"By this do they mean that 16 to 24 year olds subscribe to a cloud storage system like Amazon's..."
I was wondering about that too. I would assume it refers to people who knowingly signed up to a dedicated cloud storage service, since otherwise it would be basically anyone who uses the internet. The report just says "Use of services to store data on the internet (cloud computing)", which doesn't really clear things up.
And what computers are they referring to?
It's like asking people if they think they are skilled in vehicles.
You may think of driving if you drive for a living; taxi driver, delivery driver etc.
If you are a vehicle mechanic you may think of a related knowledge set and also of repairing vehicles.
Were people in the survey asked 'what do you think is a computer skill?'.
Is it using a certain piece of software that they use for work?
What?
The article is so vague as to be of questionable utility.
to continue the analogy, there are people who drive but aren't paid to drive, people who are paid to drive but don't have any particular skills, those who have qualified to drive particular types of vehicle and get paid a bit extra BUT I would say there are only a few hundred people in the world whose job depends on how WELL they drive (as opposed to how safely, reliably etc).
Without a link to the actual report this is mere hearsay.
Certain Reg reporters habitually fail to link to primary sources - this really must change. If the primary source is not available publicly, it would be courteous to indicate this; otherwise it should always be linked to.
This is much more important than the page layout redesign.
or you could use an internet search on phrase "Internet access – households and individuals" from article
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/householdcharacteristics/homeinternetandsocialmediausage/bulletins/internetaccesshouseholdsandindividuals/2018
Perhaps this report actually is representative of reality, sad face
My skill set is a mixture of company training and self attainment. I benefited from both and I hope the companies I worked for did too. I imagine that it is rare for someone to have the exact same skills needed to push a business forward, so some training would be required, although I've seen people required to take on roles that they were not competent at without training. The last company I worked for recruited web developers from within the business. They were trained and had to show a level of competence before being allowed to work in their new role.
"Why do people assume that training should be provided by the company?
Training is YOUR reasonability, it’s YOUR skill set and you are responsible for it."
Not really. Extreme example: If I'm employed to operate a paper cutting guillotine and cut my hand off because I didn't know how to use the tool correctly then the employers would be liable for not providing the training, not me.
Training is to give people the ability to do their jobs correctly. If employers need a job done then they need to ensure that staff know how to do the job either by offering training or employing staff who do know. Sometimes you're not going to find staff with the required skill sets.
As a professional I agree with you that you should look after your own skill sets and make sure you are up to date but if your employer turns around and says we want you to switch from technology A to technology B then the onus is on the employer to provide and pay for the training.