Making It in IT: Avenues for Career Advancement

IT training and certification expert Ed Tittel sheds some light on the career prospects for a senior level computer systems admin student with a demanding internship that could turn into a full-time job. 

Hi Ed,

I am a senior level computer systems administration student. I started working at a company as an intern in desktop support last April. In December, I was promoted to system administrator for a variety of systems and network management and reporting tools, including HP NNMi, HP Operations Manager, HP Business Availability Center, HP Service Manager, HP SiteScope, and Westbury SMI Reporting.

The company currently has a support contract to help me out, but once that expires, I’ll be on my own. The contractors I work with tell me that to manage all of this software, there should ideally be seven to eight system administrators. I'm not sure if you are familiar with this software, but some of it is extremely complex (especially HP Service Manager), and I understand only a fraction of it. I am learning a lot however, and the job will look very good on a resume

I currently get paid $12 per hour (a pittance in my opinion even if I am an intern), but I do expect to be offered a full-time position when I graduate this December. I'm not sure what salary would make it worth my while to stick around. I am worried that since I am the only system administrator, I will be expected to work extra hours to get everything done.

What advice can you give for someone new to IT? I'm not sure what to do.

Thanks,

Dave T.

P.S. What kind of certifications would be good to get for a system admin? I'm looking at getting ITIL certified.

Dear Dave:

Thanks for your recent email. I’m happy to shed as much light as I can on your situation, and to recommend possible avenues for your career development.  It certainly sounds like you’re working on some interesting tools and technologies, and I agree that you may be overwhelmed when your current support contract expires and you have to do everything on your own.

I’m not intimately familiar with the latest HP management modules and platforms, but I know enough to understand that you will probably be sorely beset with work when your contractors are no longer available to you. I’m also experienced enough in the ways and wiles of outside contractors (and sometimes, I work as one myself) to guess that the real number of people needed to do the job is somewhat less than 7 or 8, but also, probably more than one!

And for what you’re doing, your hourly rate is pretty darn low. You could manage a fast-food restaurant for the same money (or more) without anywhere near as much anxiety or stress.

My question has to be: will you really want the kind of full-time position your current employer might offer you once you graduate at the end of the year? If you’re not sure what salary would make it worth your while to stick around, let me tell you that you shouldn’t get near this kind of job for anything less than $50 or $60K per year depending on local conditions in the near-Chattanooga area.

On the other hand, you may be able to do better were you willing to go someplace like Nashville, Knoxville, Atlanta, or Augusta instead. In those metro areas with the same responsibilities, you’d want $70K or higher to make it worth your while. My gut feeling, however, is that your offer will come in somewhat lower than that, perhaps significantly less.

And if you are the only system administrator, you probably WILL be expected to do whatever it takes to get your job done, even if that does mean working extra hours. One easy way to feel this out is to observe your full-time colleagues and to see what kinds of workloads (and work-weeks in terms of hours invested) are typical. I hope you’ll also be able to get some idea about how your colleagues are being compensated, because that will pretty much set the tone –and the ceiling, since you’re an entry-level, straight-out-of-school person – for what you can expect to make.

It will probably be worth your while to participate in on-campus recruiting to see what kinds of other jobs might be available to you upon graduation, and to get a sense of how much those positions would pay. This will establish the general overall baseline against which you’ll have to weigh whatever kind of offer is likely to come in from your current employer.

I would also urge you to look around to see if you can find other business operations that use the panoply of HP management tools you describe in their IT infrastructure, and see how many people they have to handle those responsibilities. If you do decide to take the job, and more than one person is really needed to do it, you’re going to have to start lobbying for additional headcount right away. You won’t want to put yourself in the situation of having to do multiple jobs for any longer than is absolutely necessary.

Honestly, my hope is that you’ll find some other position where the company is more humane in its pay scales and in its expectations for its employees (and interns). Your description of your current situation is by no means warm and fuzzy, and I don’t get a good feeling that stepping from intern to full-timer is necessarily going to be much of an improvement.

But, gosh, I could always be wrong about that, and you might end up in a better position than what I can see in (and read into) your e-mail. But my thinking is that the best outcome might be to find another job where you can make a fresh start, earn a decent salary, and work in an environment where you can learn and earn without having to shoulder big responsibilities right away.

As for certifications for system administrators, ITIL (particularly service management and service delivery) is not a bad expertise to cultivate, but you’ll also want to look at platform stuff (Microsoft, Red Hat,HP/UX, or whatever’s in use where you work now, or where you might like to work in the future) as well. When I hear system administrator, I don’t think only of process and operations management and best practices, I think more of platforms, systems, applications, services, and networking. I think many employers feel the same way, too. That’s why something like the new MCSE or RHCE might make sense, depending on your platform allegiances.

I hope you’ve found this information useful. Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions or concerns you might like me to address in the wake of this reply.

Best wishes,

Ed

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

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