I’ve never understood why we believe computers — now vital for a job — should be something that people are just allowed to know nothing about with no consequences. If a welder comes in to a welding job and doesn’t know how to turn on the welding machine or do the simplest tig weld, they’d rightly be fired the same damn day.
Yet if a user comes in and even after using a computer for 20+ years and can’t open the application they use daily and can’t find a file that is located right in their Documents folder, we excuse it. And I don’t think we should. I think the incompetent should be trained and if that doesn’t work they should be fired just as the welder would be. If you cannot use a vital tool for your job, you should not have the job. It’s as simple as that.
Recently where I work, a new person was hired who did not even know how to open Outlook and could not do the simplest things on her computer. One of my staff helped her a bit and got her going, but she still complained to HR that we “hadn’t trained her enough” and that our assistance was inadequate. HR came after my team, which has nothing to do with training and is in no way responsible for any of that.
I defended my person and fought back; I observed that if HR was hiring people clearly unqualified for the job (which absolutely requires competent computer use), and that they should also organize training and some sort of evaluation pre-hire for the needed computer skills — and, furthermore, I could not find “training” in any job title in my group.
That one died because of course it did. A lot of stuff gets shoveled over to IT — as I’ve observed before — as it’s often the only generally-competent department in an organization. And I’ve gotten better at pushing back over the years as I’ve gotten more senior.