How to tell a good sysadmin

How to be a good administrator

High professionalism and personal qualities of the system administrator, his ability to quickly find solutions to non-standard acute problems are of great importance for the company. A good helpdesk can significantly increase the efficiency of your business due to the quality performance of its tasks. Therefore, it is very important for a company to find a really worthy specialist.

Unfortunately, choosing a good sysadmin can be very difficult. It is often difficult to distinguish a high-class specialist from a poor candidate for this position. Only the experience of the system administrator is far from always decisive. A good specialist should not only have sufficient knowledge and skills, but also a certain intuition that helps in solving complex problems.

The choice of a diploma specialist in this case is also not suitable. The main baggage of professional knowledge and skills that they need in their daily work, system administrators receive by self-education, constantly faced with tasks of a wide variety of nature. Universities do not have a direction of training as a system administrator. It is important that the candidate has a basic higher education of a technical profile and has taken special courses. It's good if his luggage contains certificates, for example, from Cisco.

In fact, only time helps to distinguish a good sysadmin from a not so good one. Only by observing the activity of the helpdesk and the results of its work, one can really adequately evaluate a specialist, understand how useful and necessary the company is.

In addition to professional skills and knowledge, a good system administrator must also have certain personal qualities. His ability to solve complex production problems and his ability to work with people depend on this. It is not obvious to everyone that the helpdesk administrator spends a significant part of his working time talking with people.

The main personal qualities of a system administrator include:

Ability to simultaneously solve several diverse tasks and quickly switch between them.

Resistance to stress is the ability to cope with a significant amount of work, communication with management and with users, whose behavior is far from always adequate from the point of view of a system administrator.

Ability to correctly plan your working hours.

Ability to communicate with people. The system administrator must be able to listen to and understand users, draw the right conclusions from communication with them.

Technical mindset, ability for engineering systems thinking.

Also, system administrators are often required to know the English language. This is especially true for companies that constantly cooperate with foreign counterparties or clients. In addition, the system administrator must understand all basic commands and system messages in English without a dictionary.

Three main qualities of a system administrator

To summarize the above, there are three main features that any good sysadmin should have:

Ability and desire for learning and professional development.

Ability to communicate with people and the desire to help them.

Understanding and love for technology.