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June 15, 2002

Help Wanted: Hiring Your Tech Team

By Sandi Estep, Ph.D.

An ed tech expert shares tips for assembling and retaining a crack technology crew.

Superintendents and school boards often assume that after spending heavily on technology, their work is done. Not so. As districts continue to allocate more and more dollars to the purchase of wires and boxes, the need for qualified people to make those systems run smoothly grows accordingly. Even more important is the need for a significant investment in educator training to ensure the new technologies are being used effectively in the classroom. A top-notch technology director and the right support personnel can make all of this happen for your district.

Titles commonly used to designate a school district technology "alpha dog" include technology coordinator, information systems manager, or information technology director. These are most often people who hold an administrative certification for K-12. Those without certification might be called computer information systems coordinator, technical specialist, IT supervisor, or technology manager.

In an ideal world, districts would hire two people to head the technology team-one from the education field and one from a technology field-with supervisory authority given to the educational administrator. Together they could offer the district both the best in curricular integration and the best boxes, wires, and software to meet their learning and productivity goals.

There is another key reason why a district needs two people. When they hire someone who comes from a non-education background, the community may feel an initial euphoria about hardware and software upgrades and system reliability. However, when the "outsider" moves into training teachers, a backlash may occur. As every veteran educator knows, teachers tend to summarily dismiss those outside of education telling them how to teach. There is enough teacher resistance to using technology without the district adding one more reason for them to feel reluctant.

When I was a regional technology director for the Illinois school board, the most frequent requests for assistance were from school systems in search of good tech help. Today, as a university professor, I am still called upon by districts across the country to assist with hiring technology staff. Administrators ask me: How do you attract qualified people? Should you train people from within your district? How do you get people to stay with you? How much should you pay them? How do you hire someone when you don't even understand technology? The following resources can help you find the best possible person, or people, for your school district.

Searching

Regardless of whether you're just beginning to hire a technology staff, filling vacancies, or reexamining your current personnel assignments, it's important to take a hard look at what your needs really are. Before searching, ask yourself: What will the primary responsibilities be? Is this an administrative position? Is it a curriculum integration position? How many people do we really need? Once you've resolved these issues, you can be clear about the job description.

Contact the legal educational agency in your area. An LEA may be a regional office or an intermediate service center. Most of these offices have a director of technology whose job is to assist school districts. If your state does not have regional centers, then approach the state-level technology director. Ask him or her to post your opening to their technology e-mail lists. This will attract a pool of candidates who are familiar with the priorities, grants, and policies in your state.

Place ads in the technology help wanted sections of your local newspaper. The current downturn in the economy means many highly skilled techies are out of work. This unfortunate situation may be an excellent opportunity for schools to secure over-qualified people at reasonable salaries. Will they stay with you when the economy recovers? Perhaps not, but in the interim you may get a couple of years of excellent assistance.

Advertise on the Net. Tech people will turn to the environment that they are most familiar with when they search for a position. Job boards such as Monster.com and HotJobs.com are popular with out-of-work technology specialists.

Consider outsourcing. Private head- hunting firms that specialize in technology will prescreen candidates and send you people who have the skills that match your needs. It is money well spent when you consider the stakes.

Some districts prefer to hire a technology consultant who will develop the job description, advertise, screen applications, and conduct interviews. He or she will assist you with the final interview process to help select the candidate who best matches the unique needs of your district.

If your district is in a high-tech area, ask students with parents from the technology industry to help with your search. These parents have the experience and knowledge, not to mention a vested interest, to help you hire the best candidate. At the very least, they can help develop interview questions and sit in on the actual interviews.

Tap your internal resources. Normally, exiting employees are never used to help hire their replacement. In technology, we should make an exception. If the person leaving was highly successful and is exiting on good terms, then use him or her to help with the search. That technology director knows what skills are needed to meet the unique needs of your district.

Seek out and promote teachers in your district. If a teacher on your staff has a high level of technology knowledge, you can send him or her for the additional training needed to become a part-time or consulting systems administrator. Teachers already have ownership in the school district and will be more likely to stay with you for the long haul.

Interviewing

Having determined whom you want to interview, you now need to craft the interview questions. Interviewers, especially ones who don't think they're up to speed on technology, often find this phase of the selection process most troubling. They feel they do not know what to ask and worry they will not understand the answers the candidate gives.

To prepare, develop two sets of questions: general questions and technology-specific questions. The general questions are those you would ask to help determine if the candidate is a team player. What do they like or dislike in a boss? What do they consider to be their weaknesses? Do they know where they want to be in five years? If they whine about previous bad experiences or bosses, or blame others, they aren't a good fit for your organization. (See "Sample Interview")

Next, develop the questions that specifically address technology. These can be broken down into three areas: knowledge, experience, and work ethic.

Knowledge: These questions should test the candidate's basic knowledge about computer systems. For example, do they know about ghosting software (copying the same configuration and installing the same applications on multiple computers) or comparable programs? How about backup systems?

Experience: These questions should address the interviewee's experience with your district's particular hardware and software. If your district primarily uses Macintosh computers, for instance, then you would want to know about their understanding and experience with Mac operating systems.

Work Ethic: Last, you need to examine their work ethic. These questions will give the candidate the opportunity to demonstrate that she or he knows how important it is to keep the network up and running with the least disruption to the clients-even if that means working nights and weekends.

If you still feel uneasy about interviewing the candidates, use a panel to conduct the interviews. Ask tech-savvy parents, technology teachers, and regional or state tech personnel to sit on the search committee with you, or hire a consultant or a tech director from a neighboring school district to handle the entire selection process. All of these are good ways to approach the selection of your new technology staff. Of course, once a technology director is hired, it would be his or her responsibility to select the rest of the staff.

Retaining Your Staff

Pay and Benefits: With the current and upcoming shortages of personnel in most areas of education, salary has become a major reason for people to jump to another district. Generally, if you do not pay salaries comparable to what businesses are paying, your technology staff will be tempted to move to a business or a school district offering a better pay scale.

However, the recent national downturn in technology has temporarily eased that situation for school districts. As one technology director told me, "I have a lot more security working in a school district than my buddies do who were working for some major tech companies." There is truth in her statement. The result for school districts has been that fewer tech directors are leaving education to join the business world. Down the road, however, when the economic situation turns around, districts may have to move their salary scales closer to what businesses are offering.

Tech directors normally understand that they will often need to work odd hours after school or on weekends in order to minimize network disruptions. In order to avoid exhausting the district's personnel budget, keep overtime pay to a minimum by offering comp time to the tech staff. Providing comp time tells your salaried employees that you appreciate their hard work and long hours. It also provides flexibility for hourly employees who may require some extra time off. For a school district, comp time is often a win-win proposition.

Benefits should be commensurate with education, training, and responsibilities. For example, if the technology director has a college degree and administrative certification in your state, then she should have the same pay and benefits as a district-level administrator. Large high schools may have a building coordinator with a building-level staff to supervise. If he is degreed and holds an education certificate, then he should have pay and benefits that match building-level personnel. If he holds an administration certificate, he should be paid and have the same benefits as the other building-level administrators, and so on (see "Salary Guide").

If the techie has a degree but not in education, then look at comparable salaries and benefits in businesses in your area. This is the group most likely to leave you if a better offer comes around so their pay should be as competitive as possible.

Training: Technology directors know they must stay ahead of the curve. Such directors are good for the school district since they prevent investments in technology that is about to become passe. What's more, they need to keep abreast of innovations in curricular integration. Technology is always changing. Those who direct technology have a burning desire to upgrade their skills and will feel hamstrung if a district does not understand and support that notion.

On the other hand, school districts should be mindful that employees may become so highly skilled that they will want to move on to a higher-level, better-paying position. Districts should write language into a tech director's contract that states if the employee terminates employment prior to serving with the district for three years, the employee must reimburse the district for the actual cost of all certification training provided by the school district. Examples of certification training include A+, Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator, Exchange 2000, Cisco Certified Network Associate, or Certified Novell Administrator. It is reasonable for a district to expect three years of service for their investment. If the employee has landed the job of a lifetime, she will not hesitate to reimburse the district. If the new job offer is only marginally better, she will hesitate to leave prematurely.

Conferences: Sending the tech staff to state and national conferences sends the message that the district wants to keep its staff in the know.

It also sends a message that the district values the tech staff enough to want them to learn and be leaders in technology innovation. Superintendents and curriculum administrators often get to attend national conferences for valuable learning and networking experiences-the technology staff needs those same kinds of experiences, perhaps even more, since technology changes so rapidly.

Team Involvement: The tech director needs to be part of the district administrative team. He or she needs to know what is going on everywhere in the district if they are expected to provide service to all. For example, the district may not realize that the tech director is an essential member of the crisis team. In the event of an intruder in a school, the tech director will know how to suspend television, computer, or telecom services to keep the perpetrator from watching the story unfold in the media. Without the tech director's active involvement with the administrative team, their services may be overlooked and the team may be unaware of important information they need to know to run the district smoothly and safely.

Planning and Budgets: If you want the tech team to have a sense of ownership of the system, they need to be the group responsible for planning and budgeting. A technology director should not have to go to someone every time she needs to replace a NIC card or upgrade the virus software. One story I like to tell is of the tech director of a small school district who was doing a major upgrade of all hardware. There were a few incidental items that he needed to order during the installation, but every time he went to the supervisor for authorization, he was chastised for adding to the cost of the project. After the installation was complete, the tech director knew that their virus protection for the district office was adequate, not great. He decided that instead of requesting the funds to upgrade and incur another tongue-lashing, the system could probably get by. Then, the Melissa virus hit. The district's documents were virtually wiped out, because the tech director knew what he needed but did not have the budgetary authority to act on it.

If tech directors are given budgetary responsibility, they will better understand the constraints and plan accordingly. Understanding the plan, priorities, and the budget might prompt the tech director to look for alternate sources of funding.

Warm Fuzzies: Technology directors are expected to have the system available and running reliably. Too often, people forget to offer kudos. For example, a superintendent of a district that had just completed their LAN and WAN asked at a team meeting how the new system was working out. As the principals responded, each reported some minor glitches in his or her building. After the meeting, the tech director said, "Thanks, guys. We worked overtime on this for six weeks and all any of you had to say, in front of the superintendent, was what was not working." We tend to just expect the system to work and forget to acknowledge how far we have come. In retrospect, each of those administrators could have pointed out how wonderful it was to have all new computers and finally have an e-mail system. They could have told the tech director after the meeting of the minor tweaks they needed. Instead, the tech director was crushed and he surely reported that to his staff.

Everyone needs an occasional pat on the back. However, the human needs of the technology staff are often overlooked. People tend to point out problems or what needs to be done next and forget to offer accolades for the improvements. Knowing that their hard work is recognized and appreciated works well for all employees, including techies.

Dr. Sandi Estep, a professor at Governors State University, assists school districts across the country to assess and hire technology personnel.

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