I served 4 years in the Country Club (aka USAF) as a computer operator, even graduated as an Honor Grad from tech school. It didn't truely prepare me for my first duty station, even though it did help me as I was qualified by my supervisor to work by my self after only 2 months when normal training time at a new duty site is 6 months.

This is what bugs people, I tell everyone that the first thing my supervisor did was to teach me to read. When ever we had a problem and I came to him, first thing he asked was "What does the manual say?". Then he started teaching me tricks of the trade that made me even better. He even taught me how to run our computer system without the SPO (Supervisory Printer Online - Burroughs B3500). Ours broke one night on second shift (the busiest for batch processing) and after calling the FE, he said we could sit and wait, or I could learn something. We ran that computer system for 3 hours using the card punch machine, the card reader, and the line printer. Shocked the FE when he came in to work on the SPO.

Sharing knowledge is great, but you have have to want to learn. Same thing happened shortly before I left England. The people I was working with at the time then, all they did was move the card punch in the computer room for me. The didn't care to learn how to keep things running.