I have had three “real-world” problems presented to me this week that are a good representation of problems present in the day-to-day life of a technical consultant. I work with several schools as a consultant and I end up getting a few troubleshooting calls. This week I had two that looked identical but were completely unrelated.
On Monday one of the administrative computers could not get email. On Tuesday another computer couldn’t get email either. There was one main difference; the “Tuesday” computer could not get to any web pages while the “Monday” computer could get to most places on the web.
It turned out that the first computer had an erroneous DNS setting and the second computer had lost its connection to the DHCP server. Both of these problems are fairly simple to troubleshoot, but required a solid understanding of basic computer networking.
As I handled the second problem, which on the surface looked exactly like the first problem, I thought about the “multiple choice options” available to me to fix the problem. No one was dangling a list of “answers” in front of me in the standard NCLB form.
On Wednesday I was asked to solve a completely different problem. A group of people needed a way of sharing documents online, but the documents must not be available to people outside the group. This was a problem with many possible solutions, but I wasn’t given a list of possible answers.
None of these problems took long to solve. Each one required a basic knowledge of the systems involved. Formulating the answers required what I consider to be typical problem solving skills not assessable by a multiple choice test.