I can certainly believe what htis has to say. We have a lady at our small business (10 employees) and when she first started working here click-and-drag was particle physics for her. Which is surprising as we are an internet company. This IT-illiteracy not only stalls her work b/c of spyware and the lot. It also makes it so she doesn’t understand the basic workings of a computer. Such as a computer will only do what you tell it to so if it messes up YOU did something wrong. I swear she’s convinced it ‘makes up it’s own mind’ sometimes which loses productivity because she will blame the computer for doing something that it turns out she did. So she goes about trying to fix the computer instead of the problem.

Not using alt/tab to switch between apps accounts for a good day lost each year. It drives me crazy watching people mouse around the screen instead. Microsoft even makes a mouse with a ‘application switching’ button on it!

And PLEASE learn ctrl c and crtl v.

I’ve seen this first hand in a system migration.

Training costs money. What’s typical is to train a handful of employees and have them train everyone else which has pluses and minuses, the biggest plus being cost savings. The minus being training is pretty much hit and miss.

Employees are taught the bare minimum skills to do their job. If there are 20 ways to do a job related process, employees are taught one. Whether the other processes come into play just depends on circumstances. Even though there may be more efficient ways, employees are taught what’s easiest or the most simple.

People are naturally resistant to new processes, especially the oldschoolers where I work. Many had never touched a PC before the migration.

The ironic thing is all the effort in upgrading technology and processes to cut costs and produce bigger profits is countered by the fact that that technology is not being maximized. Overtime for instance and the number of employees needed to do a job. The knee jerk reaction to this type of problem is to throw more employees at it instead of investigating how the tech can actually streamline the process. It’s a slow painful realization that will come too little and too late.

ultimate security is using VMware and your favourite OS/browser combo, then when you close the window, don’t save the state, so each time you open it, you hav a clean system, and your base OS is clean of all the crap. Natuarlly, you should still use the browser directly when doing important and legit stuff that needs to save changes.

>no one smart [uses windows]
waht about DirectX only games? Like it or not, there are a lot of games which are only available in a windows/directx version.

I have 25+ yrs in tech fields ranging from equip. repair to software development to ISP management. And here is one problem I have seen repeatedly: every application (as in, apply for a job) asks if the applicant is computer literate.
Well, now, we here on TD know that literacy is a hugely undefined quantity…from your grandma who can ebay and email to those who can recompile a kernel just so.
The method usually involves some “Windows Lite” quicky test that ensures the user indeed knows about those buttons on the mouse, and has some decent keyboarding skills, and some minor level of word proc and maybe even spreadsheet (and almost always Windows products only, btw). And generally, the testing is done by peoply with no more than mid-level competence themselves.
Heres some amusement:
We had one lady who could use a PC pretty well, for the most part, but who would only save and retrieve her files from floppies – she only knew how to go to A:, so thats what she did with every single file. She had in excess of 350 3.5″ disks on a rollaway next to her desk. Never could convince her of the magic of C:
Our office manager – and head of admin dept – puts in a priority request for a larger monitor (“screen”)…she can’t see all her emails, only the upper portion. Solution is to show her how the scrollbar works (in fairness, the Co. had just gone from a long-term TTY mainframe system to individual PC’s, but still.
Same lady wants to fire a girl for violating her order that all admin PC’s have precisely the same identical layout, same desktop, etc. for uniformity. But they each have different jobs, and so they each have to install different software packs. When the icons on Susie’s desktop are suddenly different from the others, Ms. Manager goes nuts getting ready to can the girl in order to set an example (we saved her before she lost her job, of course).
And I was the only one in the company who had enough experience to develop a damn spreadsheet that would bring together the information necessary to properly bill our equipment lease customers for lease taxes in individual states, counties, and municipalities. Saved the Co. $35 large the first year. In the past, they simply paid the taxes since the entire admin dept had zero Db skills. Now thats nice of the service manager, dont ya think? The real killer was the a’hole acct that the Co. used, who had to drive across town to have me resort the output of the spreadsheet! every freakin’ time he needed it sorted!
But then, that’s job security at its best, I suppose.

I support state agencies within the State of Wyoming government. The problem is not necessarily that users are IT illiterate – they are – but, that is merely a symptom of a bigger problem – the problem that older end users are just not willing to learn how to effectively and properly use their computer and the basic applications (IE, Office suite, etc).

So how many IT illiterate end users are really open and willing to learn? I think that the work force is slowly phasing out that generation of employees, but it is taking time, and we as IT Admins must remain patient with those users who still refuse to learn.