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There are all kinds of reasons to hire all manner of professionals, and often, diversity is the best perspective to take. Not necessarily diversity in terms of tokenistic identifiers – hire without bias and this should come naturally anyway – but diversity of thought, capability, and experience. In other words, hiring people from a university graduate scheme can be just as helpful in the long run as headhunting a top-level executive.

But what about modern standards and what we expect from our staff? In our digital world, it’s often quite commonplace to hire those with at least some basic IT Understanding. But do you need advanced understanding? What level of familiarity is necessary? Perhaps you use the full Google suite but know that many enterprises are locked to Microsoft, a similar but inherently different ecosystem. How long will it take to onboard this new professional?

While basic IT familiarity is of course essential for many roles, you may consider hiring those who aren’t thoroughly skilled in its use and still prosper. Let’s consider why that is:

Consider Actual Technical Need

For the most part, unless you’re bringing on a coder or someone who actually needs to manage intense and advanced Digital Systems, a surface-level understanding is just fine. Outsourced IT support is reliable, can ensure uptime and security, and will allow you to scale modular IT necessities into your business anyway. So, provided you can train this individual on your software package, odds are a basic understanding is more than enough. For more technical tasks, certifications are of course required.

Consider Prior Experience

Depending on technical expertise in the past or experience in similar fields, your prospective employee may be more than capable of adhering to your new systems. For example, if they’ve used a word processor, they can most likely understand how to use management software with a little training. If they’ve kept paper inventory or accounts before digital systems became the norm and then took some time off work, odds are they can adhere to the new system as well.

Consider The Long-Term Tech Developments

Ultimately, the systems we’re using right now will be outdated within ten years time or more. At the rate of AI integration, the odds are that this is going to come sooner rather than later. For this reason, it’s important to remember that most of us are skilled in IT, but only for the moment. Even high-level technical specialists like animators, music production professionals, and video editors will need to train on new software within five years or so, so don’t discount someone with current-gen experience, as this will likely include you in a short amount of time also. Better train now than never.

With this advice, you’re certain to see the best of people even with limited IT skills, widening your skillset, ensuring you don’t accidentally discriminate by age, and plan for the future of staff capability within your firm. This is a question more and more firms are having to ask themselves, and luckily, you’ll have been proactive once you implement this advice.