How do you find the right employer?

wirestyle22

@wirestyle22 said:

If I could do anything I would be working with File Servers, VM's and maybe even Media streaming. I find them all to be interesting. At the same point I don't really care. My primary concern is to put myself in a strong position to provide for my family ultimately. I will do what I need to do period.

File Servers I see as phasing out very quickly. Already I see them dropping very quickly. Like AD, we phased ours out in the past few years. They just don't make sense like they used to.

VMs are ubiquitous and is almost like saying "working with computers". All servers are VMs and should have been for nearly a decade now, even in the SMB. It should be assumed that anytime someone says servers, VMs are just assumed. It's not something that you really specialize in, it's just part of doing everything else. In the enterprise space you get a few rare roles that are "platform" roles that just handle the VM layer, but they are few and seem to be getting fewer as that gets absorbed by the more technical and needed systems departments.

I can't answer what I want to do because I don't really have a preference. I currently run Exchange, our File Servers, VM's which include AV, print servers, utility servers, and a domain as well as a standalone SQL database server. I run all cabling, setup all switches etc. I have no preference. Keep in mind I didn't build this I inherited it and they won't change anything.

DustinB3403

@Dashrender said:

LOL - my Spam filter does that for me.

When your mail system is up and running.

I feel like mail-bagging is a redirect for all mail, which then get forward to your mail system. Not only during outages...

But I've never used it so its hard for me to say.

Dashrender

@Breffni-Potter said:

@Dashrender said:

LOL - my Spam filter does that for me.

So if you change filters you know what features to look for.

LOL, when I change filters, I'm going to O365 using their filter

scottalanmiller

@wirestyle22 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

I understand but If I want to get out I need to put myself on a path to realize my goals and gain the knowledge to transition from baby admin. I don't know what path that is.

We don't either BUT we can figure one (or more) out once you determine a career goal.

Try this exercise... within reason, where are you today and where would you like to be in a year, three years and five years? What kind of job, what kind of duties and what kind of technologies do you wish you were working with?

If I could do anything I would be working with File Servers, VM's and maybe even Media streaming. I find them all to be interesting. At the same point I don't really care. My primary concern is to put myself in a strong position to provide for my family ultimately. I will do what I need to do period.

One Year: I'd like to be much stronger than I am today in my knowledge. I don't think I would make a transition within a years time but if I were given the opportunity of course I would take it.

Three Years: I would have "finished" my education in my given career path and started applying to much higher end jobs. I use quotations because as we all know we are never done.

Five Years: I would have a few years of experience as a higher end sysadmin.

I think that this is a good start, but mostly you are just saying "I want to improve." I think you need to be way, way more specific. System Administration is a group of job roles, not a singular one. In even a medium sized company that's not even a single department!

Your roadmap should be details enough (not that it can't change, but just to give you a starting point) that you would know to whom to submit a resume or with whom to interview for a "dream job" if it came up.

wirestyle22

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

I understand but If I want to get out I need to put myself on a path to realize my goals and gain the knowledge to transition from baby admin. I don't know what path that is.

We don't either BUT we can figure one (or more) out once you determine a career goal.

Try this exercise... within reason, where are you today and where would you like to be in a year, three years and five years? What kind of job, what kind of duties and what kind of technologies do you wish you were working with?

If I could do anything I would be working with File Servers, VM's and maybe even Media streaming. I find them all to be interesting. At the same point I don't really care. My primary concern is to put myself in a strong position to provide for my family ultimately. I will do what I need to do period.

One Year: I'd like to be much stronger than I am today in my knowledge. I don't think I would make a transition within a years time but if I were given the opportunity of course I would take it.

Three Years: I would have "finished" my education in my given career path and started applying to much higher end jobs. I use quotations because as we all know we are never done.

Five Years: I would have a few years of experience as a higher end sysadmin.

I think that this is a good start, but mostly you are just saying "I want to improve." I think you need to be way, way more specific. System Administration is a group of job roles, not a singular one. In even a medium sized company that's not even a single department!

Your roadmap should be details enough (not that it can't change, but just to give you a starting point) that you would know to whom to submit a resume or with whom to interview for a "dream job" if it came up.

Let me do the research and I'll get back to you. I'll check out what companies in my area are hiring for and let you know what sounds appealing to me. That's really the best I can do. I guess for now I'll get my Network+ since I can use that for my CARF accreditation and move on from there.

scottalanmiller

As a start, when it comes to "I want to advance my career" and especially when you don't have super solid direction, which is not uncommon because how do you know what you want to do until you have done it all, the top thing (and this goes for people with really solid direction too) you want to build a home lab, an epic one.

A home lab you can get access to the tech, the techniques, the trends, the products and all the stuff that your job does not. Certs are a decent way to push yourself to do boring things or things you never thought of, helping to avoid gaps. I like certs not for the paper that they provide but for the education they push you to do.

Build a lab that makes your company jealous. Make sure that in any discussion you could roll your eye and laugh with disdain at the joke of IT that your company uses. Don't actually do it, but have those thoughts deep down inside. Make your servers better, your email better, your security better, your file serving better... everything, make it more current, better implemented, running faster and doing more than you get to do at work. If they ever question what you are doing, mention that they take their business less seriously that you do your home network - set the bar higher than they do. Don't let your job define your quality bar.

wirestyle22

@scottalanmiller said:

As a start, when it comes to "I want to advance my career" and especially when you don't have super solid direction, which is not uncommon because how do you know what you want to do until you have done it all, the top thing (and this goes for people with really solid direction too) you want to build a home lab, an epic one.

A home lab you can get access to the tech, the techniques, the trends, the products and all the stuff that your job does not. Certs are a decent way to push yourself to do boring things or things you never thought of, helping to avoid gaps. I like certs not for the paper that they provide but for the education they push you to do.

Build a lab that makes your company jealous. Make sure that in any discussion you could roll your eye and laugh with disdain at the joke of IT that your company uses. Don't actually do it, but have those thoughts deep down inside. Make your servers better, your email better, your security better, your file serving better... everything, make it more current, better implemented, running faster and doing more than you get to do at work. If they ever question what you are doing, mention that they take their business less seriously that you do your home network - set the bar higher than they do. Don't let your job define your quality bar.

I will post my incremental progress. I'm sure there will be war stories lol

scottalanmiller

Volunteering can be great, too. I did some really great career growth (like I learned tons of stuff) and managed to move forward in my job prospects very quickly when I did a couple years of volunteering with a private school back home. The school had no money, so I provided everywhere. I paid for their desktops, their monitors, their switches, their cabling, their rack, their server, their firewall, their phones... everything. They got a student's dad who was an electrician to volunteer to actually run the cables, but I paid for all the stuff.

We took that school from "never had a computer" to "had a computer lab, computers in the classrooms, teaching computer, application and keyboarding labs, having after school community classes, VoIP phones" and more. It was an amazing experience. Not just was it good to do, good for everyone, but I got to implement a greenfield system, for a large environment, soup to nuts from first cable to last desktop. Everything. Every decision, all planning, all features had to come from me. There was no leaning on someone else, no skipping pieces I didn't know, no using "whatever was there". You learn and you learn fast.

And every issue that arose had to come to me. If a computer didn't boot, I had to fix it. If an account had to be created, I had to make it. If a file needed restored, I had to restore it.

scottalanmiller

@wirestyle22 said:

Let me do the research and I'll get back to you. I'll check out what companies in my area are hiring for and let you know what sounds appealing to me. That's really the best I can do. I guess for now I'll get my Network+ since I can use that for my CARF accreditation and move on from there.

Does "your area" matter? One of my career tricks was being completely location agnostic. Any amount of being tied down geographically will hamper you dramatically unless you are in NYC or London, pretty much, and even there it can hold you back a bit.

scottalanmiller

@wirestyle22 said:

...CARF accreditation and move on from there.

CARF?

Deleted74295

@scottalanmiller said:

The school had no money, so I provided everywhere...I paid for all the stuff... Everything. Every decision, all planning, all features had to come from me. There was no leaning on someone else, no skipping pieces I didn't know, no using "whatever was there". You learn and you learn fast.

And when it's your money, you suddenly want to do purchasing properly too So you learn that as a skill.

RamblingBiped

@wirestyle22 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

If I could do anything I would be working with File Servers, VM's and maybe even Media streaming. I find them all to be interesting. At the same point I don't really care. My primary concern is to put myself in a strong position to provide for my family ultimately. I will do what I need to do period.

File Servers I see as phasing out very quickly. Already I see them dropping very quickly. Like AD, we phased ours out in the past few years. They just don't make sense like they used to.

VMs are ubiquitous and is almost like saying "working with computers". All servers are VMs and should have been for nearly a decade now, even in the SMB. It should be assumed that anytime someone says servers, VMs are just assumed. It's not something that you really specialize in, it's just part of doing everything else. In the enterprise space you get a few rare roles that are "platform" roles that just handle the VM layer, but they are few and seem to be getting fewer as that gets absorbed by the more technical and needed systems departments.

I can't answer what I want to do because I don't really have a preference. I currently run Exchange, our File Servers, VM's which include AV, print servers, utility servers, and a domain as well as a SQL database server. I run all cabling, setup all switches etc. I have no preference. Keep in mind I didn't build this I inherited it and they won't change anything.

Do you have a home lab? If not maybe you should like at implementing one and working with systems and technologies that you will not be able to get firsthand experience with at your current job.

So you've got experience administering a Server 2012 Domain. Can you join a Linux client/server to it?

You've got experience managing Virtual Machines. Can you migrate a Hyper-V VM to XenServer? KVM? VMware?

Are you able to setup VoIP? Conigure a SIP Trunk? Register a SIP Client?

Even if you don't know the tasks in and out you can setup a list of tasks like those above and expose yourself to the associated systems, services, and technologies enough to have an informed/intelligent conversation in an interview.

RamblingBiped

@scottalanmiller said:

As a start, when it comes to "I want to advance my career" and especially when you don't have super solid direction, which is not uncommon because how do you know what you want to do until you have done it all, the top thing (and this goes for people with really solid direction too) you want to build a home lab, an epic one.

A home lab you can get access to the tech, the techniques, the trends, the products and all the stuff that your job does not. Certs are a decent way to push yourself to do boring things or things you never thought of, helping to avoid gaps. I like certs not for the paper that they provide but for the education they push you to do.

Build a lab that makes your company jealous. Make sure that in any discussion you could roll your eye and laugh with disdain at the joke of IT that your company uses. Don't actually do it, but have those thoughts deep down inside. Make your servers better, your email better, your security better, your file serving better... everything, make it more current, better implemented, running faster and doing more than you get to do at work. If they ever question what you are doing, mention that they take their business less seriously that you do your home network - set the bar higher than they do. Don't let your job define your quality bar.

Ha! You must have been typing this out as I was starting to make my own reply evangelizing the usefulness of home labs...

scottalanmiller

@Breffni-Potter said:

@scottalanmiller said:

The school had no money, so I provided everywhere...I paid for all the stuff... Everything. Every decision, all planning, all features had to come from me. There was no leaning on someone else, no skipping pieces I didn't know, no using "whatever was there". You learn and you learn fast.

And when it's your money, you suddenly want to do purchasing properly too So you learn that as a skill.

That's a huge one. Although the goals of a home lab are not the same as a business. So in some ways you learn good stuff and in other ways you learn bad things.

Good: Not spending money willy nilly, learning that open source and low cost options are often viable or even better, shopping around, learning where to find good gear, paying attention to what is cost effective.

Bad: Getting used to buying tech because you are emotionally inspired by it, buying things just because "other companies use it" or getting expensive things because working on them tends to pay the bills.

scottalanmiller

@RamblingBiped said:

@scottalanmiller said:

As a start, when it comes to "I want to advance my career" and especially when you don't have super solid direction, which is not uncommon because how do you know what you want to do until you have done it all, the top thing (and this goes for people with really solid direction too) you want to build a home lab, an epic one.

A home lab you can get access to the tech, the techniques, the trends, the products and all the stuff that your job does not. Certs are a decent way to push yourself to do boring things or things you never thought of, helping to avoid gaps. I like certs not for the paper that they provide but for the education they push you to do.

Build a lab that makes your company jealous. Make sure that in any discussion you could roll your eye and laugh with disdain at the joke of IT that your company uses. Don't actually do it, but have those thoughts deep down inside. Make your servers better, your email better, your security better, your file serving better... everything, make it more current, better implemented, running faster and doing more than you get to do at work. If they ever question what you are doing, mention that they take their business less seriously that you do your home network - set the bar higher than they do. Don't let your job define your quality bar.

Ha! You must have been typing this out as I was starting to make my own reply evangelizing the usefulness of home labs...

This was from yesterday, too...

http://mangolassi.it/topic/7817/the-newbie-s-guide-to-the-ultimate-home-it-lab-experience