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What's the average day like for a System Admin?

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Andrew’s Answer

Eric,

Great question and welcome to the group of folks who truly keep the lights on in this digital age!

While the "average" day is never average, I hope I can give you some advice on handle to objectively handle ANY day as a SysAdmin.

You really must enjoy problem solving and have the ability to interact with a very diverse group of people with myriad of needs and varying degrees of technical understanding. As a SysAdmin, you will constantly be chasing a problem or a new solution for your company. Time management and prioritization of tasks and projects will make or break you. When everyone is asking for a piece of your time, the best thing you can do is determine which requests are most important and communicate an honest expectation of time to complete those requests.

I learned early on in my career that saying YES to every request, then not giving an accurate ETA was a surefire way to disappoint most of my customers, most of the time. When you're able to tell someone what higher priority issues you are working on ahead of theirs, you empower them to adjust their expectations or get approval from your leadership to increase the priority of their needs. Having a good relationship with your leadership team is vital to success in that regard.

Last, but not least, remember that those you work with should be a team. Hopefully you're never the sole SysAdmin at an organization or you'll never take a vacation. So if you have more experienced team members, learn from them by offering to take tasks off their plate. Offer your time and they should hopefully respond in kind with their knowledge. For those coming up after you, extend a hand and help bring them onboard and up to speed. They'll be the ones taking load off your shoulders soon.

Find ways to work as a team, organize your work and reduce the noise. Focus on those items that will truly improve your organization's productivity and you'll be a rock star!

All the best!

Andrew J.

Andrew recommends the following next steps:

Always be learning - new technologies or new methods for efficiency
Treat those with less technical abilities than you with great customer service and respect. You want that person in accounting to be on your side when your expense report gets fouled up.
Explain your work to others and you potentially prevent problems in the future.
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Danny’s Answer

I agree with Andrew, he gave a wonderful response. I like being a Systems Admin because it allowed me to work with people from various departments to solve a complex problems. Here's my typical day:

Check and respond to urgent requests/email/slack messages first

Have a stand up meeting with my team and update them with the status of the work I'm working on

Work on issues based on priority and communicate the status with the business user.

Document my work in a non technical manner

Rinse and Repeat

Danny recommends the following next steps:

Find out how the workload is priortized
Work with our team/manager to see how work is assigned
Communicate often to keep everyone updated on the status of your work
Reflect on your accomplishments by having measurable metrics like "I automated this process that use to take 20 hours and now it's only 4 clicks and 10 minutes per month"
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