When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator
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Like all job titles, this should be pretty obvious yet in IT, it is not. Hiring managers know what they expect when hiring someone for this role or with this job description in their history, yet job candidates often feel that the title is meaningless and can be used anywhere. It cannot. Good shops will immediately rule out candidates that they perceive as lying on their resumes, so having honest, proper titles or descriptions are important.
First, no matter what title your job gave you in the past doesn't give you the right to repeat that to other people, at least without prefacing that it is a title and not an honest description. System Administrator applies here just as much as does any other title. Your job can give you the official title of deity or president of the country, but it would be unethical to repeat those titles to people as if you were trying to make them believe that you were actually a lesser god or the country's president. Lying is lying, even when it is repeating someone else's lie.
Second, a role is assumed to be full time, at least within the job. If you state that a job is part time, that's fine, of course. Your job description should reflect the vast majority of your job. Using a term like system admin implies not only that the majority of your time is in system administration, but the large majority of it. Assuming at least 75% as a minimum, more is better. Essentially no one ever hits 100%, everyone has some other task to do sometimes, but if you are using a specific title, those "other things" should be rare. If your "other things" play any significant role, you really aren't just the single title.
That means that in a 50 hour work week, about 38 hours of that minimum should be focused on whatever is covered by the title/job description that you use. Or so closely related to be reasonably included. For a system admin, that means that things like dealing with end users, working on applications, managing databases or working on the network are all outside of the title, they should be tiny tasks making up less than 25% of total time, probably way less.
If you are a hiring manager and you want to hire a mechanic with ten years of mechanic experience and you get someone with ten years of "mechanic" on their resume you expect ~20,000 hours of mechanic time. There is some room for variance, but not a tonne. If you find out that that person was actually only part time at 30 hours a week instead of 40, and spent half of that time as an office manager, suddenly your desire for 20K hours of experience is seeing only 8K, that is a big different. But IT people will often play with numbers even more dramatic. It's not uncommon for job titles suggesting 20K hours of experience to have less than 1K.
It's also important to understand that system administration as a full time activity for one month is very different than it being an extreme side activity for years. The approaches and mindsets change when you focus on a task versus do it a little as a pool of tasks.
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Where is the list of "approved" job titles?
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@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Where is the list of "approved" job titles?
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2017/01/standard-areas-discipline-within/
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So according to that, the term Administrator should never appear in a job title?
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@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
So according to that, the term Administrator should never appear in a job title?
All IT disciplines come in Admin or Engineer. That's how you know HOW the discipline is applied.
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At "low levels" and / or with heavy user interaction we tend to just call people techs instead of admins, but tech is really an admin role.
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Example: Helpdesk Tech is really End User Administrator.
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"Systems. Shortened from “operating systems.” Systems roles are focused on the operating systems, normally of servers (but not necessarily in all cases.) This is the most broadly needed specialized IT role. Within systems, specializations tend to be such as Windows, RHEL, Suse, Ubuntu, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OSX and so forth. High level specializations such as UNIX are common with a single person or department servicing any system that falls under that umbrella, or larger organizations might split AIX, Solaris, RHEL and FreeBSD into four discrete teams to allow for a tight focus on skills, tools and knowledge. Systems specialists provide the application platform on which computer programs (which would also include databases) will run. Desktop support is generally seen as being a sub-discipline of systems, and one that often intersects pragmatically with end user and helpdesk roles."
So what would I be if I administrated both Windows and Linux systems?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
So according to that, the term Administrator should never appear in a job title?
All IT disciplines come in Admin or Engineer. That's how you know HOW the discipline is applied.
This establishes that I am at least an administrator. The question then is of what?
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@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
So what would I be if I administrated both Windows and Linux systems?
The OS doesn't change anything unless you are specifying something. So while doing this task, you are working as a generic system admin.
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@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
So according to that, the term Administrator should never appear in a job title?
All IT disciplines come in Admin or Engineer. That's how you know HOW the discipline is applied.
This establishes that I am at least an administrator. The question then is of what?
IT. Just IT in general.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Where is the list of "approved" job titles?
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2017/01/standard-areas-discipline-within/
I would like to see an NIST or other non Scott list that the industry references.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
So according to that, the term Administrator should never appear in a job title?
All IT disciplines come in Admin or Engineer. That's how you know HOW the discipline is applied.
This establishes that I am at least an administrator. The question then is of what?
IT. Just IT in general.
LOL - that's where I landed myself several years ago Just
IT Admin. -
All SMBs have the same role....
SMB workers, with only the rarest exception, are only Generalists and only Admins. There is no engineering roles in SMB, there are no specialists roles in SMB.
SMBs sometimes do engineering (but not often) and it is normally dramatically under 1% of total time. But most SMBs outsource this small amount of engineering to sales people at vendors.
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If this conversation were about how to go on a date, this would be your advice:
Girl: So tell me about yourself
Me: I am a human male -
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
So according to that, the term Administrator should never appear in a job title?
All IT disciplines come in Admin or Engineer. That's how you know HOW the discipline is applied.
This establishes that I am at least an administrator. The question then is of what?
IT. Just IT in general.
LOL - that's where I landed myself several years ago Just
IT Admin.If you are in the SMB, that's what you do. You can play with things like "IT Generalist", "Generalist Admin", "IT Guy" or whatever, but the basics are always the same.... IT Generalist doing Admin stuff.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
So according to that, the term Administrator should never appear in a job title?
All IT disciplines come in Admin or Engineer. That's how you know HOW the discipline is applied.
This establishes that I am at least an administrator. The question then is of what?
IT. Just IT in general.
LOL - that's where I landed myself several years ago Just
IT Admin.If you are in the SMB, that's what you do. You can play with things like "IT Generalist", "Generalist Admin", "IT Guy" or whatever, but the basics are always the same.... IT Generalist doing Admin stuff.
Technical Human
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@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Where is the list of "approved" job titles?
Use the advanced tools and search by skills, title or anything else.
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@Grey said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@Dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Where is the list of "approved" job titles?
Use the advanced tools and search by skills, title or anything else.
Definitely not an IT job: Informatics Nurse Specialists
