Where’s the outrage?
photo credit: jigpuAfter I first read this story, I thought that it was a pretty cool:
When Victory Baptist School, a small private school in Sherwood, Ark., was struggling to keep its computer network together last year, an 11-year-old student named Jon Penn stepped in as network manager.
Upon reflection I realized that this story is a big reason why IT departments are looked down upon as less than professional in organizations school districts today. For example, replace “network manager” with “1st grade teacher”. Would this student receive accolades or would the district be singled out as harming the educational experience of their first graders? What would fellow teachers think of an 11 year old attempting to do their job?
Unfortunately for IT people, if you’re doing your job well, it appears that you’re not doing anything at all. Everything just works and people question why you are getting paid.
Articles like the above do not help promote the professionalism of IT. Your boss, upon reading that article, could believe that they could just hire people off the streets and save money.
As IT professionals, we need to promote and market ourselves, separate the wheat from the chaff. Anyone can install an Internet appliance, but it takes a little more knowledge and experience to run the IT department of a school district.
P.S. I don’t want to belittle Jon Penn’s accomplishments, I wish I would’ve had the opportunity at his age.
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You make a very valid point here. We’ve all heard the stories about “my nephew is only 8 and is a computer whiz,” which translates to “knows how to surf the Internet” or “can install a printer.” Great for an 8 year old, but hardly on the level of trying to troubleshoot a random roaming profile issue or intermittent packet loss on a wireless connection.
Sam Orth, former executive director of Ohio Schoolnet, once commented that technology can be a difficult field because “…it’s hard to advocate for something you only see when it’s broken.” I’ve joked with my tech staff that it’s easy for people outside technology to think that it’s natural state is “working” and problems are only encountered when we’ve done something to break it. I think people inside technology may be more likely to think of it’s natural state as “broken,” and it only works because we’re tweaking it all the time.