What are the educational background requirements for being a System Admin

Eric,

Another great question and I'm glad to see you're so passionate about this field.

I'm more in favor of seeing candidates that take a vocational route instead of a traditional four-year degree. You'll get more industry-specific training this way without the incredible expense that a bachelor's degree brings (yes, this is a broad generalization).

Get your Associates from a good technical school and get to work fast. Don't be afraid to take a lower-paying job at first to gain experience. You have to put your bones in!

Once you start proving your value and building rapport within a company, it's easier to make the case for salary increases and more responsibility in your role.

As I've mentioned in my answer to your other question, don't stop learning! Keep ahead of technologies on the horizon. Being able to adapt and adjust to industry changes will keep your skills relevant and in-demand.

Best of luck!

Andrew J.

Completely agree with Andrew's comments above - in many cases a 2-year or vocational education would be sufficient to start off in a career in Systems Administration.

In terms of the education itself, there are probably a few areas to focus on:

The first would be general operating system (OS) knowledge (Linux & Windows) - those would be the two main platforms that most businesses will operate on, and having a strong OS-level knowledge of both will serve you well in the long-term. Eventually, you may want to or wind up specializing in one or the other based on the specifics of the environment you're supporting, but getting exposure to both is probably good starting out.

The second is more application-specific knowledge. Often system admins need to not only support the basic OS-level needs of any given system, but also the application-level. That might be a specific type of database, a user-facing application (like an accounting system, CRM tool, ERP package, etc.), or more of an infrastructure component (like a logging/alerting system, authentication service, etc.). Again, my advice would be to get exposure to a variety as part of your education, but you'll likely develop a more specific sub-set of skills in a particular area over time, again based on the specific environment that is used by your eventual employer. Many people who start with general systems administration backgrounds eventually go into more specialized areas like database administration or application administration.

Lastly, to be a strong systems admin, you will hopefully also get the opportunity to pick up some broad, general technology concepts as part of your education - even if you're initially not directly responsible for overseeing or managing them directly. For example, learning networking basics and the OSI model, understanding the basic best practices around security, storage/file system management, and database/data structure concepts. One of the most important skills I would suggest you work on developing is general troubleshooting and learning 'how' to investigate and solve issues. One of the most important tasks a system administrator often performs, is diagnosing and remediating issues...often with tight timelines/SLAs to get a malfunctioning system or component working again. You'll naturally build this skill as you learn the specifics of any particular technology you wind up overseeing, as everything has its own particular quirks and typical failure points - but being curious and using that to identify and resolve anything anomalous that is happening is a skillset that will generally serve you well, long into your career.

Good luck with your learning and career!