I disagree. There are people who graduate with a 3 year degree and they know absolutely nothing. I've interviewed 7 CCNAs with 3 year degrees in a row who didn't know the command 'sh run'. I gave them # cli access and asked them to tell me about what the hardware is and does. They didn't know 'sh run'. They ask for a tip or something and I'd say 'show running-configuration' and they'd type out 'show running configuration'
Sending them for 2-3 days of training isn't going to increase their skills to any legitimate degree when 3 years hasnt done anything.
As for what do I think is the fix? Lawyers have the same problem; bottom heavy. Their fix? The way lawfirms work is that those senior staff are treated better and compensated very well. That's where IT needs to go.
When I did a lot more router work (Cisco, Juniper, Ciena, Broke-aid!), my previous employer forked RANCID and wrote extensions for every router. From there, we then sent all the configs to a SVN server every hour. None of the fork was upstreamed, since it also had a ton of tie-ins to other inhouse infra.
The idea was that we had hourly backups of every router. And if bad happened, we could run RANCID in reverse and populate the configs in SVN to the router.
also I would ask for a scope of how many devices you want to know about. if you have more than a few I would either script an expect with python netmiko to do the "sh ver" or do SNMPget in some kind of loop against the IPs
"show run" (aka sh run) is about the first command anyone commits to muscle memory on a Cisco - if they have done absolutely any real work with them whatsoever.
But doing my degree, I knew several people who hung out at the computer lab and relentlessly pestered people to do their work for them. And now people routinely pay for school essays.
I'm pretty sure there are a large number of people who invest enough effort into cheating that they could have learned the material.
Reminds me of a line I heard once, can't remember where but it was definitely in the very context you mention here, it goes: "When people realize they can't reliably work with you, they start looking for ways to work around you"
The negativity seems to be pervasive at companies where tech is viewed as a cost center. At those kind of companies, IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of ignoring that issue and then the tech people get yelled at.
I've seen a major difference in attitude when the executives are involved/invested in the tech team. Even when things are really bad, failures happening all the time, it is still a positive environment and people want to help each other. It is stunning the difference it makes to just have everyone invested in the decisions from top-down so you don't feel all alone.
As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them.