Advice for finding a first sysadmin role

Coffee break
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Conseils pour trouver un employeur en alternance TSSR (AFPA)

Posted this in french but this is the english version

Hi everyone,

My name’s Richard, I’m 43 and living in Béziers, in the south of France.
After over 20 years working in catering and then a few years as a plumber, I had to change careers for medical reasons (I can no longer do very physical work or heavy lifting).

Computers and Linux have been a passion of mine for a long time. I’ve been using Linux for around 8 years (comfortable with the command line) and run a small home lab for learning and experimenting.
At home I self-host on Proxmox, running:

  • 2 WordPress sites
  • a file server
  • Vaultwarden for password management
  • BorgBackup for system backups
  • a PXE boot server for experimenting with network boot environments

In September, I’m due to start the TSSR (Technicien Supérieur Systèmes et Réseaux) course at AFPA, which is a 21-month apprenticeship program: 3 weeks in a company, 1 week at the training centre.
The problem is… I can’t start unless I find an employer, and that’s proving difficult.
So far I’ve sent my CV and cover letter to over 40 companies (mostly in Montpellier, but also local hospitals, councils, and businesses) without success.

I’m currently following a free Cisco CCNA course on YouTube.
My question to those already in the industry: would actually passing the CCNA make me more appealing to potential employers, even for an entry-level apprenticeship?

I’d really appreciate any advice from people working in system administration or network administration, especially if you:

  • Started your career later in life
  • Broke into the industry without a big IT degree, but with self-taught/home lab experience
  • Have tips on getting noticed by employers for junior roles

Any suggestions on skills, certifications, or strategies to improve my chances before September would be very welcome.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Following this thread, as I’m looking to do the same thing (just in the US). For me, I’m 37, and switching from fitness/nutrition coaching into IT, and would prefer to work with Windows as little as possible (so Linux Sys Admin roles would be nice :blush:)

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Older guy here (I’m 54). My career has certainly been non-traditional, but I’ve been in IT the entire time, so I can only give you parallel experience. Here’s the TL;DR:

My degree is in English. For reasons that would make this not TL;DR, my passion for computers and other experience led me to abandon my path toward teaching High School English. So I, too, wanted to get into IT with no experience and self-taught knowledge.

The best advice I can give is to find a small, Mom and Pop-style business or consultancy. They will give you a chance, where big companies will not. You won’t get paid very much, and you may not even get benefits (i.e., health insurance). But you’ll get a start and experience to put on your CV.

The first company I worked for hired me with minimal experience (my “interview” was the owner sitting me down, showing me a computer on the desk and a scanner still in its box, and saying, “Install this. If you get it done by the time I get back, you’re hired.” And then he left. I had to take the computer apart, install the SCSI card in a way the IRQs didn’t conflict, close it up, install the drivers, and scan something.).

I was a young guy then, but my boss also hired older guys restarting their careers. Some of these guys worked out; some didn’t. With regard to the CCNA test, I am wary of people who pass a test but have no experience. My boss hired one of these older guys who had passed the Novell Netware test (yes, that’s how long ago this was). When I took him out in the field, though, and asked him to configure some clients, he didn’t have enough DOS knowledge to edit the config.sys file and install the drivers. He’d passed the test, but he couldn’t do the job. He didn’t make it very long.

It sounds like your passion for computers, like mine, has made you more well-rounded than that guy. That will serve you better than a test. Proving your competency at learning new things and your skill at what you already know is far more important, and these smaller companies can help you do that. Over 3 years, I worked for two of these companies (one of them bought the other) before I got into a larger organization as a sysadmin. You may have to do something like that.

I wish you all the best in your future career plans, and if anything I said generates further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!

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Putting your name and resume up with some temporary agencies can also help get experience. Sometimes big outfits need a bunch of people for larger projects. I helped Air Canada migrate from their proprietary AC100 protocol to TCP/IP as a temporary worker contracted by IBM, and I learned a fair bit. Some of the other contractees had degrees in computer science, but didn’t know the first thing about network troubleshooting.

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The following is based on my 20 years of experience in IT, at US employers:

Not necessarily. CCNA (and other certifications) are typically required for regulated or public sector positions. Many of these certificates can teach you terminology and some scenarios, but it does not replace hands-on experience. Some things cannot be taught in books or videos. They must be experienced. There are also plenty of test prep programs designed to fast track people that are required to get certifications for these types of jobs.

This is probably the best advice anyone can give, and it’s how I got my start as well:

The last piece of advice I can give to you is to focus on business continuity and disaster recovery, and spend a lot of time intentionally breaking things in your lab and brute force your way into solving them. It will teach you how to deal with disasters and outages proficiently. I don’t know of any university or trade school that is teaching this.

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Now for the "advice - and remember, free advice is worth what you pay for it…And…

All my experience is based on the fact that I’m in Arizona USA.

Anything in the IT field is a NON-Regulated profession - meaning there is no license or certification legally required - the gov’t does not control it. SO…

Start a business doing what you want. Just start one. “Rich is IT”. Your skills already put you ahead of many. When you do that (again at least in the US) any and all training and classes you take are to “become better in your field” and are thus legit business expenses /tax deductions.

Now you can go to all the small and mid size companies and seek to make them clients. And if one offers you a job - that’s so horrible isn’t it. But if the price is right…

This also gives you an “excuse” to network with other trade and business groups (especially small business owners and execs) - after all you’re a business owner too. You’d be surprised by how many business organizations exist in even a small city.

If you feel confident enough, start a small youtube channel and teach/talk about tech - Lawrence systems, L1 Techs, Serve the Home. Those videos are now like having a PhD - you are now an established expert in the field.

And just start with your cell phone camera. You don’t need 4k video.

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Thanks for the replies so for. The context in france is a little different, french empoyers love their cirtificats as well as experience. My son has been looking for work during the summer as a waiter an lots of resturaunts wouldn’t even give him a trial because he hadn’t finish a catering school. However ideas for gaining experience are really useful. Starting a buisness in france is also complicated although not imposible. Small buinesses are punished, my wife teaches english to children from home and currently pays 24.5% social security (26% next year) also tax and ss are payed on total revenue and not profit so it is possible to have made a loss after paying if your buisness has alot of expences. Thats only for selling a sevice if you start selling goods it even more difficult, thats why i never went self employed as a plumber. That said it is possible and even if my income is small it is still experience. Most of what I have learnt so far is either in the context of a large buisness with many computers and devices or my hobby home lab. What would be the needs of small buisnesses. Would it be mostly fixxing replacing broken material and diagnosing and resolving network problems etc? What would be the core skills and knowlege needed to start something like this? Thanks again to all for taking the time to reply.

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I think a small business would want you to take on an additional role, like answering the phone, or some kind of field work, if they were to take you on as a regular employee. Pure sysadmin work would probably be more of a consultancy thing for small business, IMHO.

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Microsoft pushing out Win 11 is a great opportunity for smaller consultancy work. I’m sure that there are lots of smaller outfits that don’t want to or are not able to spend money on hardware upgrades because Microsoft says so.

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Unless you are well networked within an industry you’ll probably start out doing everything - consumer and business. “My computer doesn’t work” is the problem. And your job is to fix it.

WiFi, printing, networks, storage - anything that would happen in a home will just scale up. Win10 => Win 11 ==>Linux (for those you can convice). Apple (you’ll be asked this too). Software you’ve never heard of.

I literally had someone pay me $100US per hour to put together their powerpoint presentations that they wrote out by hand - because they refused to learn powerpoint!

Set up Word/Writer so they can print envelopes, etc.

I even try to teach them google since half the time I’m searching right in front of them. Only once (after having this business as a client for a year) did someone challenge me on it. My response?

You’re right. And I’ve pointed this out to you almost every time I’m here. You could have done it only you called me. For a reason…

At which point they admitted they didn’t know what questions to ask.

Oh and my “marketing” at the time? I just went to a local chamber of commerce and said “Hi I’m John. I fix computers” That was it. And I got jobs ranging from fixing Win95 to MySQL (never heard of MySQL at that time) to setting up MS Small Business Server to mail servers (nobody ever used the same one so I had to relearn everything from scratch).

The key to remember is that your clients are paying you to learn. You become more valuable with each one. And then you “reinvest” in cert trainings that you may want/need.

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Client: “I coulda done that.”
Me: “Yep, except you didn’t. You called me instead. Here’s your invoice.”

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Back in 2004 I was paid $600 to move two computers, a flatbed scanner, and laser printer from small office A to small office B a few blocks away. The job included taking apart all the cables and so on, loading the hardware into the back of my pickup truck, unloading, setting up, making sure everything worked, including the Ethernet. The job took about 6 hours on a Saturday. Why not call an IT professional service? He wanted the job done right the first time.

Two months later, the same place found out their invoicing software was no longer being supported. I was called in to install new software and get it working with their scanner and printer. $600 and 6 hours later. After I undid everything the previous IT clown show botched up, I was able to make progress with the installation and configuration. How to screw up installing a Windows executable is beyond my comprehension. All I know is it was professionally screwed up because the owner was fit to be tied when he was handed their invoice for the failed installation.

I don’t know how things are today, but back then, if you got a reputation for solving problems and solved them the first time, a few small business owners would throw money at you after doing a job well done. That was about the time when there were quite a few new IT firms starting up. They advertised how their people were licensed, certified, educated, and so on. Some small business owners quickly found out that just because you have a fancy piece of paper that says you know something, it doesn’t mean that you do. I spent a few Saturdays repairing improperly terminated cables on Ethernet installations. The problem for me was that sort of work was not steady work. One Saturday morning and early afternoon every few months was not going to pay the bills.

Unless you had the correct certifications and a piece of paper from a university that says you spend four years drinking beer and doing mind-altering illegal drugs, no IT business will hire you, regardless of problem-solving skills back inside the tool and die shop. Experience with getting a CNC machine tool built with a paper tape reader to communicate over Ethernet and diagnosing CNC controller errors, followed by fixing them, meant nothing to IT people with fancy degrees after their names. There was good reason why the shop owner where I worked full-time put zero stock into their claims.

That was then. This is now. No idea how things work today. The school-of-hard-knocks and deal-with-it-as-you-go guys like myself are retired.

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You will also find that many of the larger outfits have all kinds of weird rules that they demand compliance to, their performance metrics concentrate on shareholder value and internal operational efficiency, all to the detriment of customer service, and what actual service they do provide can be sub-par because they protect themselves with things like forced arbitration clauses, limited liability, and so on. Then there is the fact that they over-charge a lot.
Gone are the days when big outfits would let the quality of their products or services speak for themselves, now they concentrate on squeezing maximal ROI out of each worker and investment, and use legal tricks to protect themselves when the inevitable failures occur.
Dick the butcher was right.

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Man that sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

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To give you more details about my first job, my boss found a niche to fill. He wrote programs that did things that either businesses, municipalities, or police wanted. This was in the DOS days. He wrote them in a platform called Clarion Developer, which, after a quick search, I see still exists in some form. What did he write?

Invoicing (which he customized for the business he sold it to. I remember servicing computers everywhere from engineering firms to a machine in an auto shop so full of grease I was amazed it worked). A pet license tracker. A call logger for police dispatch. Township property tax tracker/calculator.

All these programs had to be installed somewhere, the data centralized on a network, and backed up. That’s where I came in (and the couple other guys who worked with me). For a new installation, we’d set up the network (server, clients, printers) in the office, dump them in our trunks, go to the customer, wire the building for Ethernet, and install all the clients.

Existing installations were maintenance: a corrupted database here, a new workstation there, etc. Sometimes one of these businesses would call and say something like, “We’re standardizing on Microsoft Office; can somebody come down and install it on all the workstations?” Yes, and we didn’t ask questions about why we were installing the one copy the business handed us with the same activation code on all the workstations.

But the core of his business were those programs he wrote, which still run in the various municipalities around here today (I recognize in particular the property tax notice I get in the mail; I coded the original version of that thing by trial and error in HP’s PCL language so it would print right, as my boss’s program sent the PCL codes directly to the printer over the parallel port).

But we would do anything. Install OS/2 on a new laptop the local Podiatrist bought for himself? Yes, sir. Climb in the attic of the Archdiocese of Camden, NJ to wire up three new workstations? Absolutely. Whatever was necessary, we did it. And boy, did it make us well-rounded, which definitely makes you a good hire for larger corporations, if that is your goal.

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It is the antithesis of free market economics.

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Thanks again to all. I am going to start looking into registering a business and at least try to get some real world experience under my belt. I was hoping to get a greater response from the community here in France in the french thread, thankyou @vannax for posting there. I will definitely continue following the ccna course that I found on youtube as I am learning a lot about the basic principals of networking, and I will also need to brush up on windows as I haven’t touched a windows machine in years except to replace it with linux. In part I am reluctant to start as I feel very under qualfied but I also know that I would research until I found the right solution unlike many of the shady operators here in southern France. Thankyou @zeroability for mentioning disaster recovery, I had not thought atall about that, can you recomend any good resourses? I will have to get a second mini pc I don’t think my wife would apreciate her website constantly going ofline. But, it’s a great excuse to get a new toy and maybe a small switch :thinking:

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You can feel underqualified, but don’t be scared. If you cannot do what somebody wants of you and you tried everything you know, you can still be honest and say that you cannot do it and don’t get paid. At least you learned something.

But be cautious what you do, especially on production systems or things that are hard or impossible to undo, e.g. changing network settings via remote connection (and then having to drive hours to fix it…) or manipulating a production database.

And try to always make snapshots or backups before changing things. Mistakes happen and a backup keeps you calm.

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Thanks thats good advice. To start I think I will try to find work installing and setting up new networks for individuals and small businesses and migrating people from window 10 to linux. The advantage here in france is that a number of loacal authorities have done this already or are planning to, this make the whole idea easier to accept for Joe Public. I will try to avoid the more dangerous operations untill I’ve had more time breaking and fixxing my homelab.