I've seen it played out time after time in the IT department where I work. There have been lots of people that are smart, have all the training and experience, but don't have the desire/commitment/capability to grow.

They don't seem to last long.

I think basic personality type plays is a big factor in tech jobs. Maybe i'm wrong.

I understand being hesitant to change for the sake of change. But what about changing the way we do things because it will be better?! When they don't get on board with the rest of the staff… it hurts the staff.

Second… I think that when hiring anyone for a ministry position, the first criteria should be that they have a deep desire to know and love God and a desire to share him with others. If not… the rest of their qualifications don't matter. So assuming the prior is true; when related to the web side of things. They should have some sort of portfolio of their work. You can't hire the pastor's nephew just because he's the pastor's nephew. He's got to know a thing or two about computers.

Take my IT director position for example. The title of IT director was added to to my job description as Tech director simply because I had built a couple of PC computers and so therefore "knew computers". While I am probably the most qualified person on our staff to be handling our network needs… I know nothing about networks. Attaching a processor and ram to a motherboard doesn't translate to IP addresses and DHCP protocol. So am I wrong for the IT director position at my church? YES. But do they really have another option at this point? NO.

Obviously it all comes down to money. There was not enough money to hire me full-time and have a separate person handle IT. So they merged the two positions. If they didn't hire me full-time, I would have had to leave and find work elsewhere. This would have left a huge hole that would have been hard to fill on the Tech director side. That's not tooting my own horn… it's just the facts.

Thankfully I'm aware that I'm not good at the IT side of my job and have been able to surround myself with advisers on the subject that are much smarter than I. We're in a never-ending process to move the load off of our small servers and have it hosted off-site. Moving to ACS Technologies for our database has helped tremendously as well as getting the staff hooked up with the free version of Google Apps. (which really just means that I've made them all create a Gmail address and we're linking their POP3 domain emails to that inbox.) So we were able to rid ourselves of Outlook.

So okay… don't hire people that won't move the position forward. But sometimes compromises have to be made.