It’s the age old battle – office workers vs IT workers. Now a new survey explores the reasons why all of this is happening. And why it’s not easy to fix.

It’s a new study made by UK recruitment site Jobsite. The study involves 1000 IT workers and 1000 non-IT office workers. The results are interesting.

67% of IT pros feel their other colleagues don’t appreciate the complexity of their work. Three-quarters say their colleagues make no effort to be educated about IT. As a result, 85% of office workers admit they don’t know how to resolve even basic IT issues.

All of this leads to a huge void between IT people and office people. Half of the office workers even think IT people only work when something goes wrong. That’s because, they say, that’s the only time they see them or notice them working. This leads to the general consensus between IT workers that their actual best work actually goes unnoticed.

And because other office workers only see or notice their IT colleagues only when problems arise, they are generally unhappy with them. 51% of office employees say their IT colleagues work slower than them. Even worse, 87% say they are frustrated with the IT staff. Pretty much anyone working in an office can tell you about the many inside jokes about their IT colleagues. And pretty much anyone who’s just visited an office has heard at least one complain about the IT workers.

Training is the key

So, does this mean that IT pros in general are simply horrible people? Not quite. As anyone in the IT industry can confirm, this is an industry that has a completely different mindset and approach to everything. Plus, the nature of the job is mostly hidden deep within layers of code.

So, you may see that all your IT colleague had to do to get your email client running again was simply to come, click a few buttons and restart it. And you may get irritated it took them two hours to get to you. But maybe, just maybe, they had to spend this time to diagnose the exact issue and then rebuild the entire mail server or something. And if they try to explain it and you go “pff, whatever”, then you can see why IT people can be a bit cranky.

Granted, quite a lot of IT pros need to work on their soft skills, too. Mostly how to communicate and explain complex things better. Then again, most office employees really do need some IT training in order to be efficient at their jobs which will only get more technical with time. So, it’s a two-way street. Everyone needs a little specific training to be able to meet halfway. And it’s the organization’s job to help solve this issue for the benefit of itself and its workers.