The company I work for has done some transitioning within the IT department. At one time we had seperate 2nd level support for our Field users, Home office and Communications. They have merged all of these together for one 2nd level support area that everyone will support all the field, communications and home office. We have one person from communications that basically has zero troubleshooting skills and I am wondering if you guys have any recommendations to help get this person up to par. I have already recommended the A+ course, read books and of course this site - msfn.org. This user is used to just monitoring routers and switches and when they went down contact our vendor to fix the problem. Now they need to perform troubleshooting on PC's when the Help Desk will transfer a log to them. What, if any, recommendations do you have to help this user get up to par?

The person needs - Training and experience....

Its like asking a sales rep of computer hardware to suddenly be able to fix & build pc's - a completely different job.

But surely they cant just change his/her job like that? The person is now doing something different to their contract surely. I'd get the union down for this one lol

Maybe my school will expect me to do tasks of an electrician now because computers have electrical components.

Sorry if this isn't helpful but I dont understand how a company/org/gov can do this sort of stuff, and not realise what they ask of people.

Some practical things would be:

- Getting his hands dirty - Get a old pc and get used to whats inside it and so on - take it apart, put it back together, learn to install OS's, etc. In my opinion, the only way to learn is to get to know PCs, how they work, the way OS's work and basically just get used to using the pc in everyway he/she possibly can.
- A+ course is (apparently) very good, but will that help the guy know instantly know what to do when a error comes up in windows or why you are getting a blue screen when a certain 3rd party program loads or why XP refuses to install on a PC with no real indication as to why it just doesn't complete its install, etc. Its alot for someone to take in that hasn't done any troubleshooting at all.
- The company *WILL* have to send him/her on training courses in this matter - if they want stuff to be fixed quickly. I believe there will likely be 3rd-party training on troubleshooting skills with PC's, in addition to MS courses.

I'm sure there is more practical solutions than this i.e. certain websites, but I do think that the company is not following protocol. Then again, it may only be illegal to completely change someone's job in the UK and expecting them to just "get on with it" but I could be wrong hehe

Regards and let us know how it goes.
Nath

Hey Nath - 'our' company uses that method!!!

Our local county council often moves people around like that. A person just sticking in backup tapes was one day asked to fix PC's in exactly the same manner. The person was never really interested in the job. That's what it boils down to IMHO - how interested you are. If you ain't interested there's no amount of training is gonna help.

This person is new to the field - it's a huge gamble whether or not they will end up actually liking it. Unlike someone who has progressed to that level and has proven thier commitment. It's an arse about face way of doing things, with a high risk of failure.

A'course the Help Desk have to assign work to the person that they're capable of doing. Building up a good repertoire in tasks that are in demand would be useful.

Boning up on the basics is always a help, wherever you can get it. On the job experience is essential - it'd be good to do as much shadowing as possible. I recon overly serious training may be a bad investment on the managements behalf.