Hi sysadmins, I am thinking of doing a pretty drastic career change. I have 10+ years of experience in chemistry doing bioanalysis and a few years repairing breath alcohol analyzers. I have always considered messing around with electronics, networking, and computers/servers as a hobby and have been using various Linux distros as my main os for almost 20 years.
I have come to see my specialty in my line of work as a dead end. I’m pretty damn good at my job but I feel like automation is going to be taking over very soon, and I’m not that good that I think I’ll be in the top 10% that get to stick around and run the automations when the robots finally take over. So I’m considering doing a career change to IT/sysadmin.
What I’d like to know is what should I learn how to do to see if I’ll even like moving down this path? What can I set up at home, break, then fix that would give me an idea as to what the sysadmin life is really like?
I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever really done any sysadmin type work with my home setups, seeing as I build and set up services I want for myself and at the level I’m willing to put up with. For the most part I can be handed something already implemented and work within that space to keep it going and adjust it to what I want it to do or fit my set up. I can usually find my way through log files and error codes to figure out what the problem is and duckduckgo my way to a fix.
You are right about automation. The big ones are Ansible and Teraform. If you want to get some training then you can look at some Red Hat courses.
I would look at some of the Red Hat certificates to boost your job chances. Like RHCSA or maybe some basic AWS/Azure cloud certs.
Thanks for the tip about ansible and terraform. I’m not quite at the point where I’m looking at getting certifications, mostly learning what I would need to be able to do to get those certifications. I’m 100% self taught with Linux, so I know what I’ve learned and I know there’s a bunch that I don’t know that I can point myself in the right direction, but I’m mostly concerned about the big hole that is how much I don’t know that I don’t know.