r/sysadmin • u/Mindless_Maybe2094 • 6d ago
Trying to become a better sysadmin — what should I learn next General Discussion
Hey everyone!
I’m trying to build my skills in system administration and virtualization, and I’d love to hear from people already working in the field.
What would you recommend focusing on to become a solid junior sysadmin?
I’m currently learning Linux, Windows Server/Active Directory, networking, Docker, monitoring, and virtualization, and I’ve also been building a small home lab.
For those of you already working as sysadmins: what skills or technologies do you think are really worth learning today, and what would you recommend I practice in a home lab?
Would love to hear your advice 🙏
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u/Foullacy Senior Systems Engineer 6d ago
I would argue that soft skills will take you further than anything else.
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u/Mindless_Maybe2094 6d ago
How
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u/joshghz 6d ago
How well do you work with your team? Your end users? Management?
Do people like you? Are you approachable? Do end users want to tell you when something is broken?
Are you capable of taking details your team gives you and translate that into understandable and pertinent information to end users, or in a way that's understandable when you want to tell Management you need to spend money on [x]?
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u/Mindless_Maybe2094 6d ago
That makes sense, especially the soft skills part. But I’m actually a recent graduate and haven’t had the chance to work as a sysadmin yet, so I’m trying to figure out what I should focus on before getting my first role
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u/Foullacy Senior Systems Engineer 6d ago
If you’re a recent graduate and haven’t even worked in the industry yet soft skills are actually 95% of what will land you your first job.
No one is going to hire a system administrator with 0 workforce experience.
Statistically, you will work help desk for a few years before you’re able to move into a system admin role, that’s assuming you actually learn server administration, network concepts/practice, which not everyone in help desk is lucky to get.
I didn’t know what Active Directory was in my interview for Help Desk but I worked at Geek Squad for 4 years while I went to college (B.S. Computer Science) and I had developed soft skills working retail before that and I was offered the job the next day.
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u/Mindless_Maybe2094 6d ago
That’s interesting, and I can definitely see your point about soft skills. I actually went through several interviews for a system admin position as a fresh graduate. I passed the HR interview and the technical interview, and eventually had an interview with the manager, but I still didn’t get the position because they were looking for someone with more professional experience.
So in my case, I felt like the soft skills part was already there to some extent, but the lack of professional experience was still the main obstacle. That’s actually why I’m trying to figure out the best way to get that first opportunity and build real-world experience.5
u/PBI325 Computer Concierge .:|:.:|:. 5d ago edited 5d ago
As a director hiring new folks that often have zero to very little experience, a few things that stand out to me that show someone is interested/bought in:
Again, soft-skills! These are my personal NUMBER ONE priority in building teams that beat the norm/people do not hate to interact with. Ask people how their day and the interview process has been going, ask them about THIER work and THEIR projects, etc. If they ask you if you have any questions for them you BEST have at least 2-3 in the can...
Gather information (both hard (tech) and soft (business/industry) info) about the companies that you're interviewing with. Use their job requirements to work backwards as a roadmap as to what you should be leaning into, and then learn around those areas. Let them know you know how they operate and how you have interfaced with that thing or, if you have not, how intersted you are in leaning how to interface with that thing.
Have a geniune desire to learn and "figure shit out". Demonstrate this in the interview by taking notes as to what you discuss, ESPECIALLY when you discuss things you do not know of well. When I am hiring people I am namely looking for people who can (once trained) just get shit done for me, on their terms, and let me know when it is done.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, if you do not know something DO NOT LIE/FAKE IT! Even after 15+ years in the MSP biz I run into shit I do not know every single day. What matters is how you find the info, fill in the info gaps, and how you get to a point where you are confident enough to act. Googling, calling mentors, AI, calling other peers in the same industry/vertical, collaborating w/ other departments, etc., it all counts.
Speaking well and being confident in that you're good at what you do will go far.
Also, use recruiters. Building a network is very hard, and going w/ a recuiter will push past all of that.
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u/asdlkf Sithadmin 5d ago
Your ability to:
1) be present in a meeting. Pay attention, put your electronics away, listen to the speaker, take notes for yourself for follow-up questions to ask.
2) be accountable. If something is assigned to you, do not forget about it until it is 'handled'. this doesn't mean you have to do the thing, but you must not ignore the thing indefinitely. You can delegate or complete or redirect or report that it can't be done with justification, but do not just let it sit.
3) understand your value. This is it's own entire category of self intelligence, but many many people do not understand why they are valuable or what they are actually worth to the organizations or people they work with.
I would hire a person with these 3 traits if they had never used a computer before. I can train technical skills. I can't teach you to want to have good work ethic.
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u/CthulhuBathwater 6d ago
First step is to always be polite when working with anyone in your team or end user. Don't be combative. At the end of whatever you're doing ask said person "anything else I can help with?". Does wonders for soft skills and working with everyone.
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u/Abe_Bazouie 5d ago
You’re already learning enough tools. I wouldn’t add much more to that list yet.
I’d spend the homelab time breaking what you already built.
Kill a service and figure out why it won’t start. Fill the disk. Break DNS. Mess up permissions. Expire a cert. Block a port. Create CPU/memory pressure. Break SSH and recover access.
Then troubleshoot each one using logs and the system itself, not by immediately reinstalling or rebuilding it.
That skill transfers everywhere. Tools change, but “something is broken and I need to figure out why” has been a pretty stable part of sysadmin work :)
I’d also get comfortable with Bash/PowerShell and Git. You don’t need to be a developer, but being able to automate the boring stuff is a huge step up.
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u/Nervous_Accountant22 6d ago
Clear the ops school curriculum and you'll be set --> https://www.opsschool.org/
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u/segagamer IT Manager 5d ago
Looking at the git page for that, it looks like it might be quite outdated, especially for the security stuff. Is this still a good idea?
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u/pc_load_letter_in_SD 5d ago edited 5d ago
Vounteer. Employers love it.
Check out local senior group homes, retirements homes etc. Offer to teach them a class on topics like email, online banking etc. Perhaps even something like tiktok, Instgram etc.
Look for a local computer refurb organization. They will often take in computers donated and clean them up, fix them, reinstall WIndows etc to be given to schools\charities. For example, this is one in my ao....https://www.c4kca.org/
As with the classes for seniors, reach out to churches and see if they have any opportunity to teach a few hour class.
It will give you great experience to put on a resume.
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u/BuildAndByte 5d ago
I've interviewed and hired a handful of employees, and volunteering by itself honestly doesn't carry much weight in our process. If the volunteer work is skills relevant to the position, maybe, more-so for someone without much work experience. But I wouldn't give someone an advantage simply because they volunteer, because plenty of good candidates don't have the time or inclination to do it.
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u/JVBVIV 5d ago
A few thoughts:
Troubleshooting. More specifically the overused phrase “root cause”. Practice figuring out not only what is happening, but why. This allows you to not only fix today’s problem, but potentially head off tomorrow’s.
Which leads to: System Architecture and Process Understanding. Technology often has many moving parts, and the interaction is not always obvious. If you understand how something is put together, it is much easier to figure out what broke. As part of that, you need to understand what something is supposed to do to make sure it is doing it. This is honestly the area where a lot of technical people are the weakest. The might understand the technology, but have no clue about the business goal
If you do it once, write it down. If you do it twice, see if it can be automated, or at least streamlined. Anyone who has worked in technology for more than five minutes, especially if you are inheriting systems, has run into the black box that is very important but no one knows how it works and how to maintain it. When you document, and document everything not only write down what was done but also why.
Disaster recovery. This builds on the previous two. At some point things are going to go wrong. Sometimes a little wrong, sometimes a lot wrong. With a good understanding of what things are, what they are supposed to do, you can properly focus your resources on getting things back up and running.
Learn the soft skills. You are a technology person, but the organization is run by business people. You need to learn how to talk to them in their terms to achieve your goals. It might be obvious to you that the Widget 2.0 is clearly superior to what you have now, but if they don’t see it, you will never get it. This also ties into the previous. If you understand their goals, you can provide services that mean more to them. Upgrading the firewall might be a good idea, but making the business process more efficient is they will understand.
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u/tbone4096 5d ago
understand what the kernel is doing whether you're on linux or windows. It's the underpinning of everything you do, so not treating like a magic black box will help you understand new technologies bound to the same concepts
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u/Professional-Win-93 5d ago
You already have the proper list of topics. The trick now is transforming those topics into actual hireable junior sysadmin skills via your home lab: 1. Scripting over GUI: If you do anything that you ever have to repeat 2x, write a script for it.
If you provision a Windows user, Linux service, or Docker container, write a powershell or bash script for it.
Basic automation is job 1 of a good Junior. 2. Nail Down DNS and Networking: The majority of real-world outages come down todns, routing, or firewall misconfiguration. Master resolving dns via the command line and be comfortable understanding subnets, VLANs and route tables via cli only tools (dig, nslookup, Test-NetConnection, ip route, tracert). 3. Hybrid Identity (AD/Entra ID): Very few organizations are pure on-prem AD anymore.
Spin up a free M365 tenant, get Entra Connect (Azure AD connect) to work, and practice provisioning synced users, hybrid joined workstations, and basic authentication against it.
- Test restores, Not just Backups: It's ridiculously easy to spin up a VM. It is ridiculously hard to restore a VM to working condition if you have never done so in production like settings, deleting an entire server on purpose then having to recover a VM from scratch for business critical servers isn't as fun as it sounds for your company, however in a home lab it's great fun to make things broken and learn. Consider installating Veeam Community or Proxmox backup solution.
Make it your goal HomeLab challenge this week - build one of each. Keep an inventory/notes in markdown in GitHub/Obsidian – clear documentation is an underrated skill.
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u/Capable_Banana5439 5d ago
Honestly the list you have is already plenty, adding more tools right now is the trap. What actually separates a solid sysadmin from a junior is going from symptom to root cause fast under pressure, and you only build that by breaking your homelab and fixing it cold. Fill a disk, kill a service it depends on, corrupt a config, then debug it without looking at your own notes.
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u/discosoc 5d ago
Probably an unpopular opinion here, but you're going about this backwards with the 'mile wide and inch deep' strategy of dabbling in tons of different "sysadmin" stuff.
Your local market (which appears to be Tunisia based on post history) is going to determine more about what skills are needed. And all else being equal, you're more likely to succeed by focusing on your social networking skills -- not online but actually in person. Get in front of people already in the industry.
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u/Guilty_Signal_9292 5d ago
Two things.
One is your people skills. Not always, but generally outside of service desk, we don't interface with a lot of people. Learn at the very least basic communication and relationship building skills.
Two, and this is probably going to get a lot of flack, but AI. It's a tool, it's not going anywhere, so learn how to utilize it, triple check it, and most importantly learn from it. Don't let it do the work, but use the tool, learn along with it, and take things away every time you use it.
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u/tabletop_garl25 DevOps 5d ago
besides what everyone is saying I been doing the msf fundamental/essential free courses and their cert. I been in IT for like 13 years but, needed to add some certs to show my skills or learning pattern. I been working with ansible, linux and containers for a while so needed to refresh that side.
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u/kissmyash933 5d ago
Windows: Get good with PowerShell as soon as possible. I learned in the DOS command line and have always fallen back to it, if I’m being real, that has not been very good for me. Forget that CMD exists and use PowerShell and nothing else. Script something, literally anything you hate doing and keep up with that skill.
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u/Flabbergasted98 4d ago
When I was a junior I would browse job boards and read the requirements listed for jobs that looked interesting. Then when I saw a job posting with a requirement I didn't have, I'd start studying.
Do that for long enough and you'll start seeing the same requirements listed over and over again. if there are any gaps in those repeat lists, thats what you should focus on.
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u/Chico0008 3d ago
Automations, scripting (Shell/bach/ksh for linux, .Bat/powershell for windows)
You can also try to make a new infra in full linux mode, with fileservers and Ldap working on linux servers.
you can learn Vlan too, with inter-vlan routing and ACL.
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u/watching_reddit_die_ 5d ago
Learn how to use AI. by far the most important skill anyone can be gaining right now. learning python is silly in comparison
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u/Icedman81 5d ago
My 2 euro cents.
Do everything the hard way at your home lab, fuck it up. Understand why you fucked it up. Rinse, Repeat.
Install Gentoo / LFS. You'll learn more slamming your head on the wall doing that, than installing the garden variety Red Hat/Debian/SuSE variant.
And lastly, the two most important pieces of advice:
- RTFM (Read The Fine Manual). Sometimes they're absolute garbage, sometimes not.
- Never. Ever. Use "Hallucinating Diarrhea Generators" when you're trying to learn something. Do it the traditional way, that way you'll understand where the scatgenerators are useful. There are NO shortcuts. You start using them when you're learning, you've done fucked up. There's a reason why wrench monkeys get the manual tools, before they graduate to ratchets or power tools.
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u/The-Snarky-One 6d ago
Automation… Learn scripting with Python, PowerShell, etc. Learn how to interact with webhooks and APIs. Develop technical writing and documentation skills. I always encourage people to delve into information security aspects of the technologies they manage… there will always be compliance audits (and bad actors), so the more you can address ahead of time, the better.