Work Experience

andybutterworth · 2015-03-30T07:51:50.000Z

Hi Guys and gals.

This year I will be lucky? to have a work experience lad for 2 weeks

Never had one before, just looking for ideas to keep him employed and to encourage him to continue into the world of IT.

He is keen on hardware / gaming, so I thought something along the lines of creating a machine from odd bits and pieces. The down side, all lot of my old units are HP business machines and don’t have a lot of overclocking options etc.

I do have access to a developer who could help.

TIA for any ideas.

scottalanmiller · 2015-03-30T07:53:25.000Z

Two weeks is not very long. Not enough time to even get ramped up in anything real. What kind of work does your shop normally do? What is the purpose of the “work study” that is so short?

andybutterworth · 2015-03-30T08:00:59.000Z

Scott Alan Miller:

Two weeks is not very long. Not enough time to even get ramped up in anything real. What kind of work does your shop normally do? What is the purpose of the “work study” that is so short?

The time scale is determined by his school. Believe the reason is to see if this is what they REALLY want to do before starting their GCSE years.

We are predominantly a design shop / manufacturer of lifestyle products for 0 - 12 yr olds.

Our IT kit is based around a VM solution running a mix of Windows / Apple / Novell servers.

Desktops / Laptops are a mix of Macs and Dells.

Gary-D-Williams · 2015-03-30T08:02:57.000Z

Get him to image a few machines and do some basic troubleshooting.

If you have the time, engineer a few problems for him to solve and explain the importance of backups

scottalanmiller · 2015-03-30T08:53:37.000Z

Hmmmm… given those goals I would have him shadow and IT person or something like that. Don’t have him to system builds or overclocking of things like that. Those are not IT tasks and will pretty much not exist even for bench work in the future. Having him do that stuff won’t show him if he likes IT, it will be misleading.

Other than shadowing someone, I can’t imagine that there is any real IT task that he could do himself. IT isn’t a field that makes that possible.

marcusreynolds2526 · 2015-03-30T08:54:24.000Z

I have one or two students on work experience each year and I usually adjust the program of work to suit the level they are at. Some are self starters whereas others need to be guided through each task. What I would normally do is try to give them some usable IT skills they can take away from the two weeks work experience. An example of a few days work would be the following.

Build a PC from parts and install an operating system and get it on the network.

Turn that PC into a webserver by installing XAMPP on top of windows.

Get them to install a PHP/MySQL CMS script such as Joomla.

Extend the functionality of Joomla by installing and configuring plugins. forums , calendars, templates etc.

Get them to build a demo website relevant to them e.g School or College web/intranet portal

That should keep them busy for a few days and it gives them a lot of exposure to technology. They will have lots of problems along the way but try and get them to solve those problems themselves i.e copy and paste errors into google and try solutions they find. If they do well on those tasks you can try some more advanced things like installing Virtualbox and playing around with different operating systems and network configurations.

If they are only there for 2 weeks then don’t let them anywhere near the production network/machines even if they are highly skilled.

andybutterworth · 2015-03-30T09:15:24.000Z

Cheers @MarcusRey. This is a great idea. Thanks for the input.

hobbit666 · 2015-03-30T13:37:44.000Z

Scott Alan Miller:

Two weeks is not very long. Not enough time to even get ramped up in anything real.

That’s the standard “Work Experience” length for School kids over here in the UK.

As people have said, build a PC, maybe do document writing or something in a spreadsheet that will help the IT team, maybe a physical inventory all your kit on site

Robert5205 · 2015-03-30T13:48:20.000Z

He wants to see if this is the career for him?

Put them in front of a workstation, tell them the Internet is down, the firewall is off-line, the phones aren’t working, there are 3 blinking yellow lights on the RAID 5 array, and the CEO has a critical video conference in five minutes!

He’ll know if this is his calling in about 15 minutes.

tomkindle2340 · 2015-03-30T13:55:29.000Z

Teach him the ropes of whatever hypervisor you use and stuff of that nature. It would be very helpful for him going forward to learn the ropes of virtualization and he might just find it fascinating

reetin · 2015-03-30T14:05:15.000Z

This is going to sound odd but making network cables is really good. One of the things he should really know how to do is to make his own network cables and that could take some time for him to get it right every time.

charlescarmichael · 2015-03-30T14:14:53.000Z

Inventory Doesn’t help much as a “Work Experience”

But! Student workers are FANTASTIC for testing your documentation!

Have him follow your documentation for certain tasks, For example we have a Checklist of commands that need run on a daily basis. The checklist doubles as an emergency “the entire IT department died in a car wreck, a non-tech needs to do this stuff RIGHT NOW!” They are great at pointing out flaws in this kind of plan.

I second the build out a VM server idea.

Have him restore a domain controller from backup to VM or Convert one.

Then isolate it from the network, and give him all of your trouble tickets to duplicate the tasks “offline”.

Show him how to create a Desktop “Clone” template with Sysprep

Show him how to migrate a PC with USMT

davewash · 2015-03-30T14:16:45.000Z

I’d say MarcusRey has a great plan with one exception. If this is going to be about helping them to decided if IT is a career path for them, they need to see some of the mundane stuff we get to do.

hiendinh2152 · 2015-03-30T14:19:45.000Z

Throw him in the deep end. Tell him to setup a sandbox environment with a working network, domain controller, ESXi host, DNS, etc

craigbellars8944 · 2015-03-30T14:38:19.000Z

Don’t forget the basics:

Tea/Coffee on demand
The trip to the local IT shop for 2 pints/litres of elbow grease, a dozen IPs and a VM

More seriously though maybe explain the basics of your network to him and get him to diagram it in Visio or Gliffy. Might help him understand.

will224 · 2015-03-30T14:43:24.000Z

Give him a walkthrough of your infrastructure and services. Have him set up a test network and hypervisor, and then have him test your backups on the test network.

bethanyanderson · 2015-03-30T15:39:49.000Z

I’m looking at having a student shadow, I think it’s just one day here (high schooler). I plan to have him help troubleshoot tickets that come, depending on where my virtualization conversion is at, have him help spin up a server, go through the daily routine of network monitoring and maintenance, and have him help me update the network port mapping. Time permits, help build out a user laptop and then setup the full workstation at the end-user’s desk. I think it’s also important to tell him horror stories of server crashes, database fails, and anything else I can recall, to know how intense and serious IT can be and how this job can impact an entire office, plant, or company.

And of course, introduce him to SpiceWorks! Wish I’d known about this great resource sooner!

rgibson · 2015-03-30T16:41:02.000Z

Robert5205:

He wants to see if this is the career for him?

Put them in front of a workstation, tell them the Internet is down, the firewall is off-line, the phones aren’t working, there are 3 blinking yellow lights on the RAID 5 array, and the CEO has a critical video conference in five minutes!

He’ll know if this is his calling in about 15 minutes.

why start him with a lite morning… Just kidding.

Gary-D-Williams · 2015-03-30T16:45:52.000Z

Robert5205:

He wants to see if this is the career for him?

Put them in front of a workstation, tell them the Internet is down, the firewall is off-line, the phones aren’t working, there are 3 blinking yellow lights on the RAID 5 array, and the CEO has a critical video conference in five minutes!

He’ll know if this is his calling in about 15 minutes.

Do you want to teach him or terrify him?

Oh wait…!

austinjaney · 2015-03-30T18:28:38.000Z

teach him the OSI model and I would recommend having him build a fileserver with FreeNAS using some spare parts he will learn about storage and get some networking stuff in as well as set up backups. I spent 6 months as a student “worker” in the IT department it was a fantastic opportunity for me and in some ways I feel I did not take full advantage of it like I should have.