Something that has been really bugging me about my chosen career field is how quickly things change. If you’re a carpenter or a mason or some other kind of craftsman, you can eventually master your craft. You learn skills that have been fine tuned over thousands of years, and you build on that until you know what you’re doing backwards and forwards. You can’t do that in the computer industry, and systems administration is worse than some other areas. The hardware isn’t such a big deal. The manufacturers usually design things so that the new stuff plugs in and works pretty much the same as the old stuff. Software is a nightmare. Every few years you have to upgrade your operating systems, and that means you have to upgrade half your software–all of it if you’re in a really specialized shop. You have to learn new procedures, new quirks (aka undocumented features), new commands, rewrite your scripts, and wait for the calls telling you that nothing on the new system works.
I hate that.
Hoping to get a jump on this process, I’ve been thinking about what skills I will need to be at the top of the sys admin heep over the next few years. What follows is the end result. Mind you that this is mostly just resume fodder and not necessarily the absolute most useful stuff in the real world.
- Four year degree in a computer-related field.
- MCSE. MCSA plus a few CompTIA certs might be good enough.
- CCNA/CCNE or at least significant Cisco experience.
- Project Management experience. Successful PM experience. E.i. no one got fired.
- Voice Over IP experience. The more, the better. Can’t have enough of it.
- Business skills, as in accounting, budgeting, juggling, etc.
- People skills. Charismatic, outgoing, motivating, and manipulating. What? did I say that out loud?
If you have all that, then you can write your own ticket. You’ll probably have to fight to stay in systems and network engineering. Somebody might try to promote you out of usefulness.
Now I have to ask myself if I’m capable of accomplishing all that. Well, maybe I’m capable, but do I really want to?
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