"Mighty IT" - Hot articles and news you can use about computer training and IT issues, from PC Training Experts!

You’ve got your certs. You’ve spent the grunt time in the trenches, learning the ins and outs of your trade. You KNOW IT, front to back, top to bottom. Yet despite your impressive IT skill set, you may be surprised to discover it is not your most important.

In this economy, people as gifted and talented as you are hungry, looking, for something, a foothold, something or someone to hang onto to get out of this freefall. Save the house. Save the marriage/relationship. Save face. Keep the roof over the head. So just having an impressive IT skill set alone is not enough these days. You’ve got to develop the side of you that likes to hide out.

Come on, you know that part. The one that doesn’t interface well with sentient beings. If you can’t plug into it electronically, you have a challenge. IT is easy; try interfacing with a girlfriend or boyfriend! Yet this is precisely the skill set to which I’m referring: your people skills.

Now don’t head for the hills! It’s not as bad as you think, really. Remember momma taught you to say please, thank-you, and hello/good-bye? What? She didn’t teach you? Sigh, this may be harder than I thought. OK, let’s take a step back, and make this a little easier.

You Are Just a "Tool" to Management

For a moment, forget about the fact that you are a super genius, and the rest of the world is full of comparative morons. We get it. We know it. We won’t even TRY to compete with you. So just for a moment, let’s pretend that you aren’t you. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say, let’s pretend you aren’t even human.

What!

Bear with me here; you do it all the time! You treat people like they are objects to be manipulated, and gotten out of your way, so turn-about is fair play. Trust me, I’m going someplace with you here.

So, pretend for a moment that you aren’t human; you’re a skill set, a tool, that can accomplish a lot of really great, tricky, nifty things. But you’re complicated as hell to understand and deal with.

Now, imagine another person ("tool"), with a lesser IT skill set than you. You can run circles around them technically. They don’t know a DOS prompt from a bash shell. But they do one thing rather well: they relate to people.

Now, imagine yourself in the shoes of someone hiring for an IT position. You have two "tools" in front of you. Which one will you pick: the one that is complicated as hell to understand, difficult to use, and causes you headaches, or the one that is easy to understand, interface with, pleasant, and still gets the job done?

Who would YOU hire: Mister, “I’ve been doing that for 30 years young pup” or Mister, “I can see your need and I have a lot of experience with that type of issue.”

Which plays better?

The one fact you simply CANNOT get around is, despite IT folks’ best efforts, nobody’s figured out a way to remove the human factor from any IT equation (well, that is unless you believe in Terminator stories). What that means to you is, you simply cannot ignore your human skill set, or lack thereof. And, it doesn’t take a genius to master the basics.

 Click on to Page 2 and let’s go over a few...