See, most of my coworkers see me as the 'go-to' guy when they can't figure somethign out. But my little secret is not that I have somehow memeorized every solution to every esoteric problem - far from it, I have TERRIBLE memory. But what I DO know is how to quickly and effectively find an answer, plus having a lot of experience I can connect close-but-not-quite-there suggestions and track down more information. I'm at a loss as to how to teach this skill, but I don;t think it's one of those things you either have or don't have, I think other can do
>this just as well if they could learn the skills. For example, schools around here do a lot with teaching kids how to type using Word. think a more effective use of the computer time would be to teach them how to perform effective searches of internet resources. I run into too many people who gaze in wonder that I found a certain piece of information, when all I did was type the topic word in Yahoo and check out the first 3 hits. No rocket science in parsing their statement into one key word or anything.
> Ok, now that I have rambled on in a dissertation that I really should turn into a web page...
>

Way too many people in the IT field seem to think you have to memorize everything, or be able to completely solve a problem on your own, in order to be effective. I spent a good deal of time trying to teach an old coworker that was NOT the way to get things done, and is not a great use of their time. A lot of (developers, especially) fall into the trap of wanting to solve absolutely every problem on their own. They'll spend hours playing around with code to find a solution to their problem instead of five minutes looking through the docs, doing a web search, or just plain asking for help. I'll admit, there is a feeling of satisfaction you get when solving a problem completely on your own. However, when a customer/company/whoever is paying for your time, you owe it to them to maximize your value by solving problems as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Many times that means just doing a quick search for the information (which is incredibly easy nowadays). Conversely, there are developers who won't attempt to solve any problems themselves. They're even worse.

As a side note, I've run into more than one case where someone has said, "I couldn't find ANYTHING on this subject." 30 seconds later I'll have an answer for them; I'm not sure what they typed into Google (or fill in your search engine of choice, for example, the UT for VFP questions), but I had absolutely problem finding an answer. I've always wondered if they actually did a search, or if they did such a terrible job of picking a keyword that they didn't get any hits. This should definitely be a "learnable" skill.