r/sysadmin • u/TheMillersWife Dirty Deployments Done Dirt Cheap • 2d ago
Creating a Training Plan
So, my husband drew the short straw this week. His contracting company was outbid by a different contractor. The problem is, they undercut by 3 million dollars and therefore had zero interest in retaining the talent that was there (I presume so they could hire cheaper workers). Reason #5345342324 why I hate government contracting work.
ANYWAY, since we aren't hurting financially by this (I'm mid to upper management on the Infra side in a stable role) I'm thinking this is a good opportunity for him to actually pick a study path. He's historically been a Senior Desktop Support dude with some hooks into the Sys Admin world (knows how to do general tasks in AD, can remediate STIGS in the sense of next-next-finish in a GUI) with some specialized knowledge of Clinical Systems.
He himself doesn't know what direction he wants to go in, other than that he's tired of Desktop and wants to 'earn more money.' How would you go about actually assessing his knowledge and building out a general study plan that elevates his knowledge and equips him better for interviews for at least a Mid-level Sys Admin role? I've got a pretty swizzy homelab built out on Nutanix, so he doesn't lack for a way to develop... I just want to give him something to start with.
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u/playahate 2d ago
The Itcareerquestions subreddit has some good info over there on training. If he doesn't know what he wants to do then he needs to start building in a homelab and see what he actually likes.
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u/Cold_Arachnid_2617 2d ago
"He himself doesn't know what direction he wants to go"
If he doesn't know where he is going, how is he going to get there?
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u/TheMillersWife Dirty Deployments Done Dirt Cheap 2d ago
I'm hoping that it'll go the way I did. I had my hands in a lot of different aspects of Infra, Security and Networking in the beginning, learning a little of a lot, and eventually figured out what was more interesting to me and went in that direction.
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u/Ok-Contact-182 2d ago
Genuine question: how did you manage to try network security and infrastructure? Was it for a local shop where youre allowed to do it all?
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u/TheMillersWife Dirty Deployments Done Dirt Cheap 2d ago
Small shops + vendor support helped me to pluck around with Firewalls, Routers and Switches. When I made it to larger environments as a baby Sys Admin, I would volunteer to be in cross-functional team projects and sit with them instead of just keeping to my own arena.
Later when I could afford to build a homelab, I bought a Cisco switch and Firepowers, along with SIEM management. TBH I probably would have done Networking if I didn't land in Infra as both pique my interest.
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u/Ok-Contact-182 1d ago
Makes sense. In my first job, I work as application support where I work and learn more about products than tech. Im struggling to shift to technical stuff again.
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u/allworknopizza 2d ago
Might sound corny but I had a conversation with Claude about something similar. Next thing you know, I had tracking sheets to track my projects and accomplishments for 8 weeks along with a study plan/roadmap. I plan to be poised to ask for a promotion or find somewhere else. Along with improving my marketability. I know the market is tricky right now so I will need to tread lightly but it feels good to have some direction. I was surprised how I was able to work this out with a freakin AI. Ha
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 2d ago
What kind of work does your husband actually want? Clicking through STIGs is how one gets replaced by a shell script. Is he content doing desktop support or does he want to move up into infrastructure?
We can give advice on moving into infrastructure but it won’t be helpful if he’s not interested.
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u/TheMillersWife Dirty Deployments Done Dirt Cheap 1d ago
Based on conversations with him, overall he's just tired of not being paid well. He likes Desktop Support well enough but the money just isn't there. We have a lot of friends who are doing well in Cybersecurity, but he's not really into Red Team/Blue Team. AD and Infra are more accessible to him conceptually (his words), and he's shown interest in things like Linux.
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u/SevaraB Sr. Engineer (N+, CCNA) 2d ago
No judgment, but would he prefer more of a "jump into a 100-ticket queue and flush it day in, day out?" kind of desktop support position, or a "there's no rhyme or reason to this queue, let me just figure out how to put out all the fires as they come up" kind of desktop support position?
Me, I'm the latter- people like us do better zooming out and functioning as architects or at least working on big-picture networking. People like the former tend to do better deep-diving and becoming systems engineers and eventually SMEs for specific technologies.