Well put Chris - You cheered me up with the excellent summary! I wish you well in you're technician hunting Alan (Bryngwyn) (not in work but at home this time!) Christopher Dawkins wrote:
Well, there does seem to be a lot of untapped talent here! ==========================================================
This gave us all a jolly laugh.
You need a GSOH to work here. Indeed, you need a GSOH to work anywhere connected with schools and IT.
All of those requirements and yet only offering £10-16K .. is this serious?
Actually 3K to 18K, depending on all sort of things. The other half of the remuneration is provided in the form of green fields and a relaxed country life: for example, here we rarely work more than 16 hours a day or seven days a week.
I know someone with a similar job.. and he earns twice as much.. (while not having quite so broad a job description) ..in addition to accomodation/food etc at the school (which is also residential).
The written job description is a mere fraction of actuality. Did I mention cleaning cough mixture out of floppy drives?
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Unfortunately, that is all the Government deems us worthy to receive.....
But here we value you highly. We know you are worth two or three times what we pay.
I too know MCSEs that wouldn't even get out of bed for that :-O Especially given the job description. Maybe you need to have a word with the boss and get a more realistic wage structure going?
MCSE? What's that? What we need is someone who can fix IT problems.
I'm an CCNA working towards a CCNP
We don't have any Cisco kit - no, I'm wrong, we have two Cisco switches we got as a second-hand bargain. We make routers out of old PCs with multiple network cards running FreeBSD.
and have an HND in Network Support, Diploma in PC Repair
All probably useful, if you can fix computers as well.
presently work in a similar position for over 25k.
You are probably worth 40K, which translates to 15K in our currency ...
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Hi All,
Welcome to the wonderful world of education!
Bear in mind that this is a private school - in LEA controlled schools you'd be lucky to get 10K for a part time, term time only position, probably requiring you to do much of that work, manage the entire network and run the MIS system!
That's part of it, there's more ...
In all probability a schools entire support and admin department probably earns less in a year than your average Headteacher and two deputies.....
and are ten times more vital. Have you ever noticed when any of the SMT are away for a few days?
So, I wonder why we do it?
It's fun, that's why.
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Unfortunately, The government is more interested in pandering to (IMHO whinging) teachers problems/wages than that of support and admin staff
A really annoying thing is LEA surveys on computer use which make no sense since they only acknowledge the existence of teachers (and students). But end up counting computers used exclusively by non teaching staff.
IME it's hardly something restricted to central government.
Much more annoying is having to recompile Netcape, Mozilla & Konqueror over and over again to try and get a version that will co-exist with SO 6.0 and Flash & Java, and getting foiled in a different way each time did I say it was fun? ... time to go bang heads against a brick wall ...
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Problem being though in areas like Carmarthenshire or Pembrokeshire 10-16k is about average if not above average.
But the fields are even greener there, though with 38" of rain here this year maybe we can compete for once.
Pembs council last year were looking for a part time IT bod to work 16 hours a week for 5.5k. The job was taken.
Exploitation! It's rife in Essex too ...
The average wage in these parts is about 120 squid. I totally agree about all industries forgetting to reward their support staff ......
We do provide coffee and tea free.
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Well, it's experience, it pays the rent, and it was an ideal job for a school leaver, who'd already helped run the network as a student
That's life, though the rents round here aren't a joke, only the salaries.
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Over here in Ireland, we don't HAVE the luxury of Technicians at all!!!
But the fields are even greener! Slainte!
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I think it is obvious that a lot of us are either overworked or underpaid,
Both.
its crazy when you think about the "importance" that the world puts on IT or ICT, yet the people carrying and maintaining the good word are very poorly rewarded for it.
True.
The biggest problem is that there is always someone around the corner who will work for the same money with no complaint, so making a stand just doesn't come into it anymore, we all have to eat humble pie and whinge amongst ourselves.
True.
This is wrong
True.
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but schools in their current mindset could never pay a non-teacher that sort of money, or anything close.
Yet they pay Microsoft whatever is demanded. This is the most amazing and inexplicable fact of the lot.
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I lost the original thread to this "techie" e-mail. From what I can ascertain, there is a job going at a school?
Yes, http://www.felsted.org/ http://www.felsted.org/vacancies/ict.htm http://www.felsted.essex.sch.uk/
(the second is last year's job description, but is still largely valid)
what qualifications are you looking for, and what OS's are you looking for experience in?
None and all, respectively. But we are realistic, so if you don't have a deep knowledge of COTAN on KDF9 machines it probably doesn't matter.
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-- Christopher Dawkins, Felsted School, Dunmow, Essex CM6 3JG 01371-820527 or 07798 636725 cchd@felsted.essex.sch.uk
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