Question:
I know of IT personnel in a certain NHS Trust who had to undertake
training in some areas in order to pass the ECDL. How on earth someone
employed within IT doesn't have the basic knowledge in hardware and
software in order to pass such a simple test is beyond me.
Answer:
-I deal with Trust IT people on a daily basis and very little you could
say about them would surprise me..
The prize one was:
A 'senior' IT support engineer that had never heard of ftp, didn't know
how to get to an ftp site via IE and couldn't grasp the concept of
changing the ftp login via File/Login As.
Also didn't recognise the phrase 'left-click on the desktop'..
-The most astoundingly ignorant IT manager I ever met in forty years in
the computer industry has ended up in a very well paid post as boss of
an NHS trust IT section. If you know the slightest thing about
computers you can't talk to this man for five minutes without
becoming very suspicious. But he has an extraordinarily polished line
in comforting charm when speaking to the totally baffled.
It's been going on for a long time. The first totally ignorant IT boss
I knew, thirty five years ago, managed to acquire a reputation as a
very sophisticated expert by getting his underlings to write papers
for him which he'd been invited to deliver at industry conferences. It
did the reputation of the BCS no good at all that he ended up in a
senior position in the BCS.
I suspect that NHS management is still enjoying the first flush of
excitingly rapid expansion in which the con artists who can hardly
believe their luck are still giving each other regular legs up the
management tree.
