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Careers in HRRecruitment & retentionThe HR professionTemporary employmentOpinion

Have a rant… Recurring IT nightmares

by Personnel Today 14 Jan 2008
by Personnel Today 14 Jan 2008

Making the decision to become a human resources (HR) consultant and leave the constraints of permanent employment was the best thing I’ve ever done.

I couldn’t have predicted, however, that IT would become the bane of my life.

I thought I’d spend most of my time visiting and meeting managers and advising clients. Instead, I find that I’m wasting entire days on the phone to various IT advisers in an attempt to access mye-mails from different computers and work out printer settings. I couldn’t have imagined the frustration of trying to sort out the most basic of daily tasks, like saving a different version of a document, or updating a spreadsheet.

At the last company I worked at, for example, I spent about three hours trying to access various subfolders, rather than writing up the report that was due in later that day. As a result, I had to cancel my plans for that evening and finish off the report at home.

But what really irritates me is the fact that no-one ever takes responsibility for the problem, even though you’ve been booked in to work there for weeks. When I accept new work now, I specifically ask the client to set me up with a log-in and make sure I have access to the relevant files the week before I go in.

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Do they ever listen? Never.

No matter how well run or dynamic the organisation might appear from the outside, the IT problems always seem to be the same.

Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

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