The Lack Knjowledge In Using Information and Communication Technology Doesn’t Do Anybody Any Favours And It Will Not Be Smart To Be Left Behind

Posted by admin

July 31, 2010

Some years ago, I was kicking my heels and wondering what to do with myself when I saw an advert and hatched a cunning plan. Ideally I wanted to look at Online Jobs as I had had my own Internet Business with which I’d operated a record shop on eBay, but this hadn’t gone well and I would have preferred to continue to Work From Home. An internet bank was expanding into an office nearby and was looking for people to fill vacancies as call centre associates to assist customers with their credit card questions. It wasn’t a job I wanted to do, I’d done something similar twenty or so years before, but what I did want to do was get some experience of the business and then try and get a transfer to the ICT department which was also situated at the same office.

I’d been working in IT since 1990 and had naturally trained in the skills necessary for working in that environment at the time and had mostly run out of time where jobs for a lot of the old skills were much more scarce and the technology had marched on and I didn’t understand most of it. Hence my cunning plan, because the bank was based primarily on the internet and that was the technology I wanted to re-skill into.

In the meantime though, I joined the call centre training programme along with a dozen others, almost all of whom were much younger than me. This was something I was very satisfied about as it gave me an opportunity to re-learn about the culture of the age group below me, something that has always discovering the music, books and things that they were interested in.

But one thing disturbed me, which was how little they knew that they were comfortable with using technology from the cot and this just wasn’t the case really was a shock and I found myself having in many cases to explain to people how to find things, change their settings and save favourite items which they would be requiring.

I couldn’t help wondering what they were being taught at school as I was sure that computer and IT skills are a major part of the modern education curriculum and that the education institutions spent a lot of money on equipment. Perhaps I was wrong.

They are going to have to start though, because more businesses
are going to analyse available technologies as a method of moving staff out of centralised offices and changing to Work From Home and needing them to do Online Jobs remotely. Although thorough technical expertise won’t be necessary as the software and equipment are not difficult to use, but only as long as the user has at least a basic standard of skill. They might be working for an Internet Business but that doesn’t mean that they are designing websites and databases, but they will be required able to get around the web, fill in spreadsheets and communicate effectively using email and other forms of instant communication.

It is a concern because I know from my experience in IT around the world, that many countries demand that their children to be tech savvy from an early age in more than just mobile phone communications. Possibly the time has come for the techies to start pointing at the smart kids and making fun of them for their lack of interest in technology and give that technology and the ability to use it, some desirability.

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