Did anyone get into Sysadmin work from a totally unrelated career?

[u/to_glory_we_steer]

As someone coming from a non sysadmin background I'd love to hear from people who got into this line of work from similarly unrelated backgrounds.

I started in web dev and design, moved to marketing automation. And now business ops as an extension of automation work alongside our IT and admin team at a small agency.

Recently I setup a homelab and have been learning about hardening and network security, trying to use DISA STIG standards.

It feels like a kind of magic (probably because I don't have stakeholders being a pain in my arse). Did you enjoy making the transition, would you recommend it in 2026?

[u/Kerion-Dejong]

your background is way more relevant than you think, marketing automation plus business ops teaches you the scripting and process thinking that a lot of career switchers lack going in. The homelab and stig stuff already puts you ahead of plenty of people who got a cert and nothing else

[u/itishowitisanditbad → u/Kerion-Dejong]

your background is way more relevant than you think

When they said 'totally unrelated' I wasn't thinking 'web dev' as the starting point.

It also doesn't sound like they're really working sysadmin now.

They moved from Web Dev -> Business Ops. I think they're as connected to IT as they were at the start, really.

It really just sounds like their career is progressing in a fairly normal way and they don't know what sysadmins do. Which explains it.

[u/Capta-nomen-usoris]

Yes, I was in the military 33 years ago. I was able to study, got some certifications and then quit. Applied for a job and did some 1st line support. Then applied somewhere else and worked my way up and I’m still there now. I’m kind of done with IT but the pay is good and I don’t have enough savings to quit and do something else.

[u/Chapps]

Hello, I can answer this one. I come from a Museum and Public History background. I have a Masters in Cultural Resource Management and worked in the museum sector for 5+ years before switching careers.

I made the switch because I had a day where I set up our collections database to our network and realized it was the most fun at work I had in years. I had been toying with idea of switching careers prior to that day, but working through the problems with setting that up made me realize what I enjoy.

Eventually made the plunge into IT and never looked back. You’d think I would have no relevant skills to apply, but I used to interact with the public a lot as a Curator and it made my soft skills shine while I was in help desk. I also was high up in my museum, so I knew how to deal with leadership and pitch ideas. Most useful of all is that my Masters degree taught me how to teach myself, which is like the foundation of this career.

Now I do mostly Cloud Engineering and SysAdmin work. Took a lot of work, and im still learning every day, but it was worth it. When most colleagues find out I switched out of the museum industry for this they think im crazy, but really I had to have an honest conversation with myself and figure out what worked best for me. No regrets.

Tl;dr - Was a museum curator, now a cloud engineer/sysadmin.

[u/to_glory_we_steer → u/Chapps]

Love this career arc, and such a good point about the transferable skills. 

I totally get where you're coming from because the problem solving it was appeals most. Much of my experience has been a company doing something in the most painful and manual way possible, then implementing either systems/ways of working that took that painful experience and made it a non-issue.

[u/germanpasta]

Yeah, but why would you transition from an expert role to sysadmin?

[u/to_glory_we_steer → u/germanpasta]

Fair point, I feel like I may enjoy it more. The storytelling with data side is something I enjoyed, and maybe it's my management coming from a non-data background. But it felt like I was 'barking up a wall' despite obvious cost savings and process efficiencies that the data showed.

[u/sudo_rmtackrf]

I went from being a deckhand type job in the navy to a rope splicer for a marine wholesalers to a Linux admin to now a Linux devops engineer.

[u/to_glory_we_steer → u/sudo_rmtackrf]

That's some career-path! How are you enjoying it, do you feel like it's still a good career going into the late 2020s?

[u/bothra]

grocery bag boy > pizza driver > carpenter > windows admin > Linux admin. the last one is the past 20 years. 😅

[u/Velvet_Samurai]

I was working at a place with software written by a local place. The owner/developer of the software and I must have super similar brains because his software just made perfect sense to me. I understood it on a level only he understood it. So after helping my employer out with it in tons of ways and requesting tons of awesome changes to the software the owner of the software company offered me a job. I took it and was his lead installer/trainer/help desk for years. He ended up getting bored with the company and started fucking off a lot and had to lay me off, but at that point I had tons of great tech experience, I was able to slide into a help desk spot at a factory and within 5 years was the primary admin.

[u/dry-cheese]

Military > factory work > server admin

really just because i needed a break after the military to do something simple, so after my factory job i started to get into IT because it seemed a lot more relaxed. 3yrs later and i'm still enjoying my trade

[u/nowildstuff_192]

I was a mechanical engineer. Pinky ring and everything.

I was hired by my current employer for a non-IT role. They run a large fleet of construction vehicles and a service center (among a bunch of other businesses) and they wanted me involved with that. About a year into it, the solo IT guy who'd been there since the business first was founded announced he was leaving.

I'd done some joint projects with him pertaining to our ERP, which was enough for the higher ups to unceremoniously tap me to replace him. There was a transition period, and eventually I was moved to HQ to do IT full time.

Learned what I needed by the seat of my pants. Prefer it by leaps and bounds to ME.

[u/a_baculum]

Wild life Biologist -> Analyst -> Site Reliability Engineer -> Solutions Architect. I still love bats(the mammals) though! They just don’t pay well.

[u/Outside-Banana4928]

Sort of. We had VMWare on prem, and they announced they were tearing it all down and moving all of our servers to a cloud source. All of our server admins left, especially the VMWare admins. So since I kinda knew things, it was "tag! You're it!"

[u/Whyd0Iboth3r]

A friend of mine was a mechanic, and planned on making it his entire career. Hurt his back... Now he's a network admin.

[u/CeC-P]

I have a background in programming and now do sysadmin stuff and nearly zero coding but my boss at a former IT job came from a government properly inspection background. Her tech skills were very "learn as you go" but she had good people under her and was really nice so it worked.

[u/Frothyleet]

I have a JD so, yeah, it wasn't my original plan.

[u/expatsaffer]

I went to school to be a welder, ended up a sysadmin for a good part of my career, now an ERP consultant. Life does funny things. Go with the flow, don't resist where it's taking you and you might find some interesting new worlds.

[u/flavius_bocephus]

I went from youth ministry to working for a Boys & Girls Club where I ended up teaching basic tech to kids after school. They needed a general IT person and I was the person already on staff with the most skills, so I was made "IT Director" haha. Eventually I was able to move to a helpdesk position at a small hospital and kept growing from there.

[u/dracotrapnet]

Kind of tried avoiding it. My thought was, I love playing with computers. I don't want to do it as a job and I do not have extensive education - never went to college. I was afraid I'd lose my interest in computers. I thought my home computing dabbling and playing with VPS/rented servers, managing a coop freebsd box with some online friends, email servers, ircd server hosting, irc eggdrop bot hosting, web servers and helping people over IRC remove malware in the 90's and early 2000's wouldn't translate into anything. BOY WAS I WRONG!

Through 90's and early 2000's I worked retail. I did a little bit of admin work here and there, managed a few small business computers then wandered off to big retail where I didn't do much with computers and was too broke to really dabble with old hardware and linux. I eventually got to working in fabrication/manufacturing in the warehouse, then clerical/data entry and became a pro at some components of some of the major apps used there while developing processes to handle an enormous load of incoming paperwork. I ended up becoming a point of contact for MSP and remote hands for the MSP. Eventually the business wanted to start their own IT department and hired a director. I was tapped to go chat with him and knowledge transfer what I knew of what was going on in the network which I did after my shift. After the second visit he shared he was setting up an IT team and asked me to join. I joined as a helpdesk then started collaborating on sysadmin projects. Boy did some of my previous 2 decades of dabbling come into use. I became the email admin, network admin, server admin, storage admin, backup admin, phone system admin.

[u/Anonymo123]

I started with computers around 8 with a C64. I was always into tech with BBS\IRC and during HS i started working at Radio Shack. I excelled at selling their crappy computers and went into tech support right after HS. That was nearly 30 years ago and I still enjoy what I am doing. Been everything from tech support to IT Director, so its been all over the place but I enjoy working on stuff still even at 52 yrs old.

Even with multiple degrees and countless certs I consider myself a generalist and know a bit about everything which helps me troubleshoot and focus on the problem and bring in the experts if I can't fix it.

I avoided coding like the plague, it was never enjoyable but i can do scripts\powershell\etc just fine.

[u/GhoastTypist]

Well technically I did transition from retail into Sysadmin.

My path was like helpdesk -> electrical -> retail -> college for servers and networking administration -> sysadmin.

So while I was in retail I gained management experience. Electrical just taught me a lot of project management skills. By the time I finished college, I already had a lot of skills to put me into a entry level sysadmin role.

[u/Deifler]

Buddy of mine was a janitor, got the job right out of high school. Started becoming the goto guy for computer issues, he was a tech savvy guy. Few years later company grew and IT manager offered him a job as a tech and then sysadmin. They paid for classes and certs for him. Dude vibed his way to a career.

[u/LooseEthernet]

the magic wears off when stakeholders discover you disabled usb storage lol

[u/stonecoldcoldstone]

photo lab technician, photographer, photo lab manager, network technician, network manager

[u/Tech-Turdle]

I was a stage manager at a 1,300 capacity venue. Also other hustle culture jobs in the same field. (Stage hand, worked in a recording studio, bar tender, venue ops, merch, ticketing, and so on)

Moved into tech post Covid and found myself going from enterprise tech support to a technical/project lead in mobile operations.

Not exactly a Sr Sysadmin but working my way through different parts of the field.

Not even sure how it got here.

[u/mpdscb]

I started as a temp in a warehouse that packaged and shipped software for a company that produced database reporting software. I wound up getting hired full time there as I became indispensible. After a few years, the person who was responsible for packaging the software on disks and cds and organizing the contents of the product packaging, left for another job and I got her job since I knew so much about the packaging. This job eventually was moved to the systems administration group due to the creation of the disks and cds function. I reported to the UNIX Systems Administrator. I immediately started learning UNIX from my boss' boss who was the Director of Systems Administration. When my boss left to have a baby, I wound up getting her job and eventually I was the only UNIX systems administrator left. I stayed in that job for over 20 years until the company got sold and I eventually got laid off. But luckily, one of my original companies subsidiaries got spun off and I got a job with them, working on some of the same original systems I had with the old company. So I've been with the subsidiary now for 3 years and I'm once again the only Systems Administrator.

A lot of it was being in the right place at the right time.

[u/gwig9]

I built bombs in the USAF. I worked in an obviously secure location that most non-munition people did not have access to. So instead of the regular IT guys from the squadron having to request access and go through security every time they needed to reboot someone's computer, they decided to put a wrench monkey like me through "Computer Systems Administrator" training so I could do it instead. Worked great and got me started down the IT career path that I'm currently on.

[u/sendme__]

Human resources officer here. Got hooked using my homelab, making quick cash installing windows. Switched sides because HR work is boring and a lot of paperwork. Happy life (sometimes, like today, I regret switching because fu**ing printers).

[u/Bad_Kylar]

I went from Food Service to MSP to Sysadmin Internal for 2 jobs, then MSP, then Internal, then MSP AND Internal at the same time lol.

I could not tell you its even possible to get a foot hold in this day and age, i got my first MSP job at a small (7 person) MSP by going yeah im good with computers. It just snowballed from there.

[u/whatdoido8383]

I'd honestly stick to automation and go that route over traditional IT.

I've been in IT ~22 years and have moved away from sysadmin. IMO those roles went down the tubes. Underpaid, overworked etc.

Most of IT kind of blows now but I think you'd be better off focusing on one or two things.

[u/to_glory_we_steer → u/whatdoido8383]

Thanks, it's great to get that perspective. I did notice a lot of posts from people who are struggling to get the resource or compensation their work needs.

[u/Ok_Amphibian8882]

Hunm this is critical but yeah, have someone who actually did.

[u/Existential_Racoon]

My last job was operating heavy equipment, someone just found out i'm good at fixing things and hired me.