I assume you are talikng about maintenance guy's? I had similar problems some years ago as maintenance reports to me.
I say shape up or ship out.
I had a lot and I do mean a lot of people like that both young and old when I first came to my job.
I have no problem with people not knowing or not understanding that's just ignorance and can be fixed with time and training if the person is willing to learn. Stupidity and Laziness can't really be fixed by you so cut your losses there.
I faced so much resistance to change and people did not want to learn new skills not because they could not but because they were lazy.
I had management backing and for the most part and I made it clear that in maintenance you will always need to learn new skills and anyone who could not do that or did not want to do that due to laziness then we did not need them.
Yes we fired a couple of people and the example was set. Everyone else got in line. We invested a lot of time and a lot of money to get them trained properly and some it took a lot more time and training than it did others but now we have a team that knows what's expected of them and they can do the job. The Investment was worth every penny.
Your company has to be willing to make the investment in their people to get there.
I think I can kind of understand the older generation's unwillingness to learn new skills. Maintenance has not historically been the type of job that requires continuous updating of skills. Nuts and bolts and hydraulic cylinders work the same way they did 50 years ago. There's definitely a comfort level with that. Some guys just want to come in, do their job, get paid, and go home. Nothing wrong with that and a lot of them do care about the quality of their work.
What you're experiencing is the clash that is still happening do to computerization being introduced to the whole system decades ago. Computers are not like nuts and bolts. They change. And if you don't continuously update your skill set, you'll quickly become irrelevant. Let me tell you what the Microsoft Word 6.0 class I took in 1997 is worth today: zip, zero, nada.
So what you see as the introduction of a new, powerful tool, they see as yet another attempt to get them to join what they see as a tiring, endless rat race of making things complicated just for the sake of making them complicated. There are so many examples of companies piling resources in automation with very little improvement in their eyes.
I used to know a refrigeration guy who was really good at managing anhydrous ammonia systems. We automated the process and all he did was complain. He would always say how much of a better job he'd do managing the system manually than a computer system could. And you know...he was right. He had a valuable skill set. The problem was, he didn't seem to ever realize that, while he could keep the system running, he wasn't always available, and one day he'll be permanently unavailable. Finding someone with that skill set is extremely difficult. That's why automation comes in. The system may not technically be quite as GOOD as the person, but the system is always available and behaves predictably. A lot of programmers even write these crazy bizarre programs that only they understand, with no regard for the next person who has to come behind them and decipher what they did.
Anyway, I'm getting off-track, here. I think now being on the skill-updating rat race is an inevitability. All of the knowledge I have now is going to be pretty much useless in 20 years, so I'm constantly having to update it. We've shifted from a world where you spent time learning a trade and then the rest of your life doing it to learning and doing the trade at the same time for the rest of your life.
