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I planned to talk about a new database method, but my Sunday paper's JobCenter section had an interesting headline: IT Is Most Stressful Job, Survey Says. Yes, our angst is newsworthy.
Are you stressed? Yes. Are you more stressed than soldiers in Iraq? No. Is IT more stressful than the number two profession listed in the survey, which is Medicine? Probably not, because when medical people say something is life and death, they mean it literally. Read the survey report at Skillsoft.
The newspaper article opened with Wal-Mart's Black Friday Web site disaster, when the site effectively cratered for ten hours on the busiest shopping day of the year in 2006. That is stressful. The Skillsoft press release talked about common stress inducers, such as users who can't find the on off switch and don't care enough about technology to learn anything about their computers and network usage. You can call that stressful, or you can call that job security.
All press releases are self serving. Skillsoft offers training materials of various kinds, including end-user training. Better training would help users, and probably reduce stress in the IT people who deal with them. Some people seem amazingly resistant to learning any technology. It is certainly aggravating to see a guy you just showed for the seventeenth time how to save a file as RTF rather than DOC perform a hundred and twenty step maintenance procedure on the company espresso machine. Take that point to heart: coffee is more important to users than their computers.
Skillsoft says an untrained user will cost a company five times more support time than a trained user. Probably true. But you can also take complicated procedures out of users hands whenever possible as well. If important, you can write a script to grab DOC files and convert and copy them as RTF files. You're less stressed, and the user can't forget.
Take a lesson from Skillsoft and advertise yourselves a bit. You don't need a press release, but some details about user time saved and business innovation supported would help your cause. Since "feeling undervalued" is number two on the list of Top Ten Work Stresses from Skillsoft, helping users, and letting them know what you did for them, also reduces stress.
Remember: more stress is bad, more bandwidth is good.
