However, quite frequently it’s the social problems that businesses face that can make or break them. Many employees lack the skills to communicate, to work effectively in teams and to manage others. Fresh graduates may not know how to work at all. The failure to address and solve these social problems results in reduced operational efficiency, inadequate management and poor employee morale.

The stereotypical programmer is an introvert with plenty of technical skills, but few social skills. How often do you hear about software development companies conducting training in non-technical fields such as leadership, team management, project management, dispute resolution and sales? It’s rare. When it comes to employee skill sets, most companies, especially small ones, focus on improving strengths instead of addressing weaknesses.

The Frontier Group recognises that its employees can’t cut code all the time, no matter how much we love doing it. Our team leaders and project managers require excellent skills to ensure every project hits its targets. We’ve partnered with local company Alive and Kicking for management and sales training for our staff, and look forward to learning from them.

Improvements in management skills are difficult to quantify, and spending cash on training when budgets are tight is difficult to justify. As always, the adage “you have to spend money to make money” applies. Small businesses can only grow as fast as their employees will let them, and The Frontier Group is grooming its employees for success.

The solution is to reconfigure the keyboard by running the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

To navigate the setup program without the arrow keys, I pressed the first letter of the desired option (eg. “a” for Apple Laptop), then pressed the right command key to cycle downwards through the list.

The configuration options that I chose were:

Apple Laptop for keyboard
USA as origin of keyboard
USA as keyboard layout
No AltGr
No Compose key
Enter for the rest of the defaults.

The arrow keys work fine now.

<enter>
<enter>
<enter>
<shift-tilde>
<period>