Why Everyone Should Get A Basic IT Education

As IT professionals, we can talk to one another using our own vocabulary. We understand each other, when we use the words “database”, “uplink”, “TCP”, “webserver”, … We know what it means, and we often even know how to configure it.

That’s not the case for most other people, who come to us for advise & solutions. They often have no clue what those terms mean, and have no incentive to learn it either – they just seek a solution to their problem.

You could think “aah, not a problem – that person doesn’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll just do what seems best for me.“. Your own solution usually doesn’t fit into the budget that particular person had in mind, so you go on to explain the other solutions – to figure out the best one.

And that’s when it hits you. You’re facing a person with zero IT knowledge, and no motivation or no will to learn anything about it. It’s all Chinese to him, so you’re playing his translator.

The problem continues when you have to explain every IT term you mention in a conversation – and usually, that’s quite a lot. You loose time. Precious time. Time you could have spent solving the problem in the first place, but spend losing it by explaining your different set of solutions. It’s needed – because that other person should assist in making a decision, as to which solution to use. It has to fit in their business plan, their budgettary plan and their own time-schedule.

They need to know if your solution will require additional courses for personnel, to keep up-to-date. Will it require changes for existing customers? Will it affect other parts of the organization? These things might not seem clear at first glance.

Explaining those IT terms, is a huge time-sink. And with today’s growing information infrastructure, it would seem stupid not to give students a basic lesson in IT. Simple things, so they know the basics of how a computer system and networking works, that data is stored on hard-drives, that there’s a difference in storing data in simple files, or in a database, …

They should know how a local network functions, that a router/switch will be the key part in how it operates. How sending e-mail means passing through possibly hundreds of hops, each one posing a possible problem in your e-mail’s delivery path.

I’m not saying they should be Microsoft Certified, or a VMWare specialist – that’ll be overkill. I’m saying that, with todays growing need for IT personnel and its growing IT dependency, it’s needed for everyone to have a basic understanding of the operation of a computer system.

It’ll help in reducing the PEBCaK problems that increase in numbers, and might even help make this IT-minded world a safer place, with users knowing how to handle (sensitive) data, the importance of passwords, …

After all, it’s not like we’ll be dumping computers any time soon – quite the contrary.