Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist
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One of the giant questions of IT: what should baseline IT knowledge look like? What is the list of all things that all people that consider themselves to be working or wanting to work in IT should know? What is the minimum, the things that every helpdesk L0 should know, as should the first day database administrator, and the first day systems admin and the first day network engineer? What are the common denominators that should be shared between all of these people and roles?
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In this post I will keep a compilation of what we decide in the thread below.
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RAID levels and when to use them - in a general sense
What is a hypervisor.
What is a CLI
What is a GUI
A few storage formatting options (I'm still fuzzy on this - is LVM actually a formatting option like NTFS?)
What is a web browser -
Basic networking is, of course, needed. Basically the knowledge associated with the Network+ certification.
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@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
A few storage formatting options (I'm still fuzzy on this - is LVM actually a formatting option like NTFS?)
That's more than more university professors know. That's great stuff that everyone should be taught eventually, but I'd not include it in industry baseline. Even very experienced and skilled people today would fall below baseline. You'd never expect an L0 to know this stuff.
LVM is an abstraction layer, not a filesystem.
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Understanding of the different between clients and servers and how terms like server are used in different context (physical server devices, software servers, etc.)
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What is an operating system?
What are the key OSes today? -
What is an application?
What is a filesystem?
What is a database? -
This might seem kind of off the wall but, Customer Service skills, whether they are internal or external customers.
Project management
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@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
This might seem kind of off the wall but, Customer Service skills, whether they are internal or external customers.
Project management
While I agree these are both good to have, neither are a L0 requirement. They are things you can/might learn while on the job moving toward L1+
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This might be more of an interview type situation, but I'm going to pose it anyways.
Give the student a bunch of parts, such as:
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A Router/switch
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parts to build several computers
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Different OS's
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A USB stick of files
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Networking cables
Give the student x hours to build a working network from parts and clean disks. I want to see a shared folder from one computer on the other. I believe that this would show a number of different things.
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Basic hardware technologies
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Basic networking technologies
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Basic OS tasks, how to install and setup, create users, create a shared folder with the files from the USB disk.
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Project Management because they had to be productive with their time.
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@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
This might seem kind of off the wall but, Customer Service skills, whether they are internal or external customers.
Project management
While I agree these are both good to have, neither are a L0 requirement. They are things you can/might learn while on the job moving toward L1+
L0/L1? Where did those come from? I'm missing something.
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@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
This might seem kind of off the wall but, Customer Service skills, whether they are internal or external customers.
Project management
That's outside of IT, though. You could argue that those are just base human skills, but that's for middle school to deal with.
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@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
This might seem kind of off the wall but, Customer Service skills, whether they are internal or external customers.
Project management
While I agree these are both good to have, neither are a L0 requirement. They are things you can/might learn while on the job moving toward L1+
L0/L1? Where did those come from? I'm missing something.
It's in the OP.
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@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
This might seem kind of off the wall but, Customer Service skills, whether they are internal or external customers.
Project management
While I agree these are both good to have, neither are a L0 requirement. They are things you can/might learn while on the job moving toward L1+
L0/L1? Where did those come from? I'm missing something.
Basline IT is the name of the game, meaning what someone would need to know running up to L0 in any IT discipline. What are the common things everyone in IT should know regardless of level, regardless of discipline.
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Everything included in the 1981 TV show Bits & Bytes.
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What is memory, CPU, storage. What is an HD, an SSD.
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
This might seem kind of off the wall but, Customer Service skills, whether they are internal or external customers.
Project management
While I agree these are both good to have, neither are a L0 requirement. They are things you can/might learn while on the job moving toward L1+
L0/L1? Where did those come from? I'm missing something.
Basline IT is the name of the game, meaning what someone would need to know running up to L0 in any IT discipline. What are the common things everyone in IT should know regardless of level, regardless of discipline.
That really does seem almost to broad. For example, a DBA really doesn't need to know filesystem or RAID levels, do they? As long as the infrastructure team gives them the IOPs needed, I think they're pretty OK - what am I missing?
It's like my AIX admin friend - he honestly can't network his way out of a paper bag, yet he has a decent salary managing AIX servers and never worries about the network aspect of it.
I don't say this to dissuade this need/desire for a common knowledge, I think it's really useful.
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Powershell 101
Linux CLI 101 -
@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
Basline IT is the name of the game, meaning what someone would need to know running up to L0 in any IT discipline. What are the common things everyone in IT should know regardless of level, regardless of discipline.
That really does seem almost to broad. For example, a DBA really doesn't need to know filesystem or RAID levels, do they? As long as the infrastructure team gives them the IOPs needed, I think they're pretty OK - what am I missing?
It's like my AIX admin friend - he honestly can't network his way out of a paper bag, yet he has a decent salary managing AIX servers and never worries about the network aspect of it.
I don't say this to dissuade this need/desire for a common knowledge, I think it's really useful.
Do you think anyone working as a DBA should not need to know about filesystems and RAID levels? MS requires that knowledge for entry level SQL Server DBAs for a reason. If you don't know that stuff, would you want to trust someone to understand how to administer a database platform? Part of the issue we face as an industry is that if we always assume someone else will do everything, we have to permit zero shared knowledge which is likely what results in so many people literally not knowing what applications and databases are, yet work in IT (they say.) There has to be a baseline of what is acceptable knowledge.
Right, and your AIX friend from your description regardless of this thread, sounds like someoneI would never accept as an intern. If he doesn't understand networking, how does he determine what his server is doing? There is a lot of networking in the system admin portion of AIX. As a former AIX admin, that means to me he can't even do his AIX portion to an L0 AIX level.
