Learning system administration
If you are not already working as a system administrator, you might feel that getting the necessary experience and training to become one will prove to be difficult. This is not true. In fact, moreso than nearly any other area of IT you can experiment with and practice nearly every aspect of system administration for very low cost in a home lab. System administration may have a lot of facets and favor those with deep knowledge, but it is also ultimately accessible to those willing to put in the effort.
In the following sections, I will describe some ways that you can get started on learning to become a System Administrator.
Build a home lab
Few people are as big of a proponent of building a home lab as I am. My own home lab experience has been among the most valuable of my career. And in my role as a hiring manager, no matter how much office experience someone has, I always want to know what they do at home on their own time. Home labs show dedication, interest, passion, and provide unique opportunities to really learn a process from end to end. In my decades in system administration, I have found that it is actually a rare administrator who has gained any real experience running a system from cradle to grave and understanding what a system and workload lifecycle are really like. Having that experience, even if only at home, can be a major point of differentiation in an interview or on the job. It can easily be the stand out factor that makes all of the difference.
Virtualization has brought the cost and complexity of a home lab from something that was onerous in the late 1990s to something that is almost an afterthought in the 2020s. The resource needs of a lab are often incredibly small, while the spare resources of most computers, by comparison, are large. And this is before we consider cloud computing and the ability to do lab work using on demand cloud resources today. While not free, cloud computing is often extremely affordable as another resource that a home lab can deploy expanding the student's experience even further. Leveraging both gives you even more to put on a resume and to discuss at the interview table.
Of course, to make this experience valuable, you must really dedicate a lot of effort - every bit as much, or more, than you would if it was a production system at a paying job. Take the time to automate, secure, monitor, update, and maintain real workloads even if you just use them around the house. A web server, a house VoIP phone PBX, email, instant messaging, a database, a media server, a remote access server, a DNS filter, you name it. There are many things that you can run in your own lab that are similar, or even identical, or heck even superior, to workloads that you would see in a common business environment. Do not be afraid to use your lab to make interesting and fun projects for family and friends, too.
Getting family and friends involved
Building a home lab that is only for yourself can be challenging because you never get to see your environment being used. When possible, I highly recommend recruiting friends and family to get involved as well. This lets you get end user feedback and experience systems more like they are meant to be used. Running systems only for yourself is far more difficult to get the experience that would match what happens in a business.
When I was first running my own home labs for system administration, I ran a family website, an email server, and probably the most interesting a full PBX. A VoIP PBX (or Voice over IP Private Branch Exchange) for home can be great because it tends to be complex compared to most home style workloads, can be used completely realistically as a valuable part of your family's communications platform and few experienced IT professionals have worked with them themselves.
In the PBX example, you can approach it with having extensions in multiple rooms and offering extensions to family members outside of your physical home. Using a PBX to build a free calling mechanism for family to stay in contact with each other easily can be truly utilitarian beyond the IT experience that it provides. Building something that provides real value and gets really used will not only make your projects more enjoyable but also makes the educational experience more like the real world.
Part of the secret to leveraging the home lab experience is to not only do everything right as you would in the best of businesses, but also to be prepared to discuss and explain in detail what you have done and how that meets and possibly exceeds the experience that someone is going to have gained from having worked in more typical work environments. Highlighting best practices, holistic management, experimentation, and the chance to have worked on the latest technologies can make all the difference between an interviewer dismissing home experience as inconsequential to them feeling that their own staff may be ill prepared to interview you due to your broader experience base and more up to date knowledgebase!
Start as a generalist and progress onto a specialist in the System Administrator field
Beyond your home lab there are other ways to gain experience before attempting to jump straight into the big business world where system administrators are most likely to be found. Of course, a common path taken is to work as a generalist in a small company where systems administration is part of the job. This approach does work but does not work often or as well as is generally expected. Making the leap from small business generalist to big business specialist can be almost as challenging as going directly from student to big business specialist in a single leap. So, we need to look at some ways to either get there directly or ways that we can assist in the transition.
Volunteer for non-profits or non-business organizations
Another option is volunteering. Non-profits and other non-business organizations often need resources that they have no means to find, attract, or afford. Volunteering in these types of organizations can be a great way to gain production experience and to demonstrate how dedicated you are to your craft. They can rarely provide any sort of mentoring or guidance, which is a significant negative, but they also generally provide little oversight or structure and will appreciate the effort that you put in, giving you more latitude to choose approaches that benefit your experience as much as benefiting them. As a volunteer, you will easily find that you can spend more time focusing on real solutions for the organization rather than needing to play politics or attempt to please a manager since you are working for free and have no job to defend or promotion to angle toward.
One of my better career decisions early on in my system administration years was to use my free time for a couple of years to volunteer as the sole system administrator of an all-Linux environment at a K-12 school. The school had almost no existing computers at all, and certainly no network or Internet access, and I was able to put on my engineering hat and design their entire environment including desktops, servers, telephones, networking, printing, and others. And once implemented, I was able to switch to my administrator's hat and manage the entire desktop, server, telephone, and storage environment from cradle to grave built entirely from Linux. I was able to do everything and do it all myself. I paid the price as an administrator for my oversights as an engineer. I saw the initial cost and design considerations and how they played out with end users. I deal with a workload from procuring the initial hardware, installing the software, configuring, deploying, training, and supporting. That experience didn't just catapult me forward in my career in the short term but is so significant that it is a valid talking point even in senior enterprise CIO level interviews much later in my career.
Presenting this experience in a Fortune 100 interview was very easy. Showing that I understood the processes and ramifications of decisions was great. Being able to demonstrate the ability to research, plan, and action every step from racking a server to production support of a system was unique. In the enterprise those skills rarely exist because typically different teams often handle each different portion of the process. Being able to show holistic oversight of the entire process brough much to the table. This range and type of experience was something other candidates did not have and made a huge different in my career trajectory.
Do not overlook doing small time support for friends and family. Almost everyone knows someone who could use some technical support at home and mostly what people need at home is system administration support! It goes without saying that this will be desktop support rather than support of servers. Real world support of desktops is certainly better than no experience at all. Putting together many different types of experience is best to show the most well-rounded total portfolio.
Self-study
Learning system administration has the benefit of there being so many great resources available on the market from books and certifications to online communities and videos. Both structured and unstructured materials abound, and thousands of passionate professionals are always online in communities just waiting to answer questions and help others in the field.
It is tempting to seek out classes or the newer trend of boot camps to learn IT skills in general, and system administration in specific, but in most cases I will advise against that approach. Boot camps especially are designed to teach you only very specific skills necessary to get up and running and through an interview process on a specific process and cannot take the necessary time to deeply teach topics. This is dangerous and often leads to long term career failure. More formal traditional class style education can be better, and some people learn especially well that way, but there are caveats.
Typically, classroom learning happens at a very slow pace and is not flexible to your schedule. This is only so much of a problem, but you lose the opportunity to move as fast as possible while focusing on what matters to you most. Very rarely can you find classroom education that is current and relevant. While possible, it is almost unheard of and there are seldom checks and balances to verify that what is being taught is useful or even accurate. Most importantly is that classroom learning is not a sustainable approach. Once you are working in the field you will not have the time to continuously take classes to keep your knowledge up to date, nor will you be able to find classes that provide for the immediate needs of the next project or challenge. Classroom learning is essentially a special case that is only available to people before they enter their careers. It is not a useful approach in an ongoing way. Because of this, learning through a classroom setting does not demonstrate a practical skill for the workplace.
Instead, teaching yourself through books, articles, experimentation, online communities, and other self-starting means that show that you are able to learn without someone else's assistance are crucial both because you will almost never have someone available to know everything that you need to know before you do and be prepared to teach it to you, and because you will be spending your entire career constantly needing to stay current and learn new technologies and techniques. Any serious profession involves lifelong learning, but very few demands it to the degree that is required in IT. Showing the ability to teach yourself whatever is needed is a very big deal to a potential employer.
Learning to teach yourself gives you a broader range of potential learning opportunities, more flexibility in how and when you learn, the potential to start learning at any time, and the ability to move at the fastest possible pace. Of course, as a reader of this book, you have already taken at least this step in seeking out formal, self-paced learning.
Age does not matter
You might be wondering when you should consider tackling the beginning of studies into system administration. Is this something you begin at university? Do you need several years in the field working in networking or perhaps in helpdesk before you can move over to systems? Do you start running desktop support before you can switch to servers?
Great questions, I am glad that you asked. The answer is actually: You can start at any age! For real, I mean it. While landing a big corporate job might be out of reach for almost any high schooler getting hands on experience and education in systems is anything but. Between books, online videos, articles, home labs, volunteer opportunities, and sometimes even actual paying work with smaller companies a high school student has so many potential avenues to build a resume, get an interview, and get their foot in the proverbial door that the best time for anyone to start studying to be a system administrator is always today.
A big advantage of IT compared to most other fields is that we have a lot of industry-backed certifications that can do quite a lot for building a resume early on in your career and almost none of them require previous industry experience or that you be of any specific age or have a degree. In fact, many high school trade programs specifically target assisting students get their first industry certifications during high school. A motivated student could go far beyond what any normal school program could provide and quite quickly building a resume of both experience and certifications.
Getting a great job might require turning eighteen before getting a chance to really apply, but there is every possibility that a high school student could use their school years to build up an impressive level of study and walk almost immediately into a great starting role and move up very quickly. If a student started studying towards an IT career in middle school and stuck with it for four to six years, it would not be unreasonable to have gained more hands-on experience than many mid-career working adults. Not every business will be keen to hire someone so young regardless of what they can bring to the business, but we don't want every job, we want that one job and a business that is really serious about their IT is going to potentially view that candidate as being the most impressive.
Internships
In traditional trade situations the standard means of gaining experience was through an internship. Today this is much less common, yet it still exists. Most internships will be unpaid. Internships can be extremely valuable, especially for younger learners generally of high school or university age, because they can provide access to traditional businesses, rather than non-profits or charities, and should provide a mentor to guide you while learning. Even paid internships are assumed to be quite poorly paid making them quite difficult for someone beyond student ages to typically consider.
Be wary when approaching a company to discuss an internship. Most companies offering internships do so believing that they are getting low-cost labor when the purpose of an internship is supposed to be to give back to the industry and community. In doing this we often see no mentoring or guidance. The intern is just used to do jobs that require no skill and teach them nothing. In companies that do at least attempt to treat an internship properly it is quite common for the company to lack the skill or resources to mentor and simply not be able to do so. Potentially the worst result is being mentored by someone who is not well trained themselves and the intern being taught incorrectly and coming out with fewer skills than when going in!
Do not let this dissuade you from investigating the option of finding an internship. Internships look great on a resume and even poor experiences can be used to make good talking points in an interview. If you were taught everything incorrectly, perhaps you can present a what not to do that was taught to you by example! Just be wary and do not think that all internships should be bad or involve doing menial labour or not being mentored. A true internship is about providing you an education via a mentor who is able to show you how the job is done in the real world. It is not an excuse to get cheap labor. That does not mean that you will never do any work in an internship. You very well may and getting your hands dirty in a real environment is part of the goal. But a true intern is there to learn and not to work per se.
Now we have a good idea of how to approach positioning ourselves to moving into a system administration role as well as how to tackle the problem of continuous life-long learning. Now we can look at the IT professional in the context of the business as a whole.