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Making the Jump From Sysadmin to Network Administrator?

Posted by Cliff on from the lateral-career-moves dept.

termdex asks: "I've been looking to move from systems administration to network administration for the last couple years but for some set of reasons networking seems to be an impregnable area of work. My experience has been like the often clichèd 'chicken and egg' scenario. Most employers aren't interested in candiates that lack serious network admin experience (ie: 80/20 network/other), but it would seem difficult to get that level of experience if you're currently a sysadmin. What advice can Slashdot readers offer as what works best in making lateral career moves? What experiences can you relate that shows difficulty or success?"

2 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But.. by Universal+Nerd · · Score: 3, Informative

    I agree 110% with skinfitz.

    My title is "sysadmin" but I'm one of the new network admins around here. I was hired to build up and maintain my empolyer's servers but, since they are the main network servers I have to administer the network.

    The two jobs are almost the same, besides - you only need a full time system administrator if you run a server farm full of Win2k (or other MS-Win??) - a good Linux admin (or other *nx) needs only a shell script to download updates for their favorite distribution and deploy them after testing them out on a 'guinea pig'-server.

    I spend about 20% of the day updating and revising scripts, 30% taking helpdesk calls, 20% reading Slashdot, Fark and The Register and the final 30% learning new stuff like program in Java, create better firewall rules, learn how to make Mozilla apps (not-so-useful-but-very-neato-stuff).

    --
    Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
  2. Go somewhere smaller by toybuilder · · Score: 3, Informative

    One possibility that comes to mind is that you are at a place that is too big for you to immediately "move up" and take the reigns of network administration. You might need to move to a smaller organization where you can apply your current skills in sysadmin 20%, and then devote the other 80% to expanding your skills to networking and management (of systems and networks).

    It's sort of like the navy -- to go up in the ranks, you sometimes have to move to a smaller ship!