How to Get Hired As a Systems Administrator

[lazyfortress]

I just cannot seem to get any job acceptance letters/emails for a systems/network admin position. For reference, I am based in the Washington DC area, and I am about to graduate from my university this May.

It seems as if most of these sysadmin positions require 2+ years of experience as a sysadmin. It's almost as if I had to have been born as a sysadmin, keyboard in hand, right out of the womb.

I really would like to know what I'm doing wrong, or what other positions I should apply to. Sure, I don't have many certifications (I only have an AZ-900 and some DoD cert for optical engineering), but I have knowledge and experience (not professional) with Windows Server, Linux (Ubuntu), and Cisco IOS environments with my own home lab. My degree will be in information science, and I took plenty of classes that involved networking, programming, and even Agile project management.

If anyone here is a sysadmin, or knows a sysadmin, could you let me know what I should make sure I have in my resume? I really appreciate any advice, I just want some hope to grasp onto.

[Mearas]

Experiance is in my opinion the most important thing, a graduation is nice, but only a door opener.
If I hire a sysadmin the CV, especially his experiance is the part I'm looking for, maybe second his graduation.

In your situation it doesn't help, but maybe it's an option to look for a lower level job in the IT and show them your knowledge. Work in second level, later third and next step is the sysadmin.

As sysadmin you have a lot of responsibility, and noone gives this to someone with no experiance - and a graduation is not really experiance, only better basics (in most cases) - sorry.

(A statement of a german admin)

[lazyfortress]

What positions do you think I should shoot for then? I was able to score an interview with the Dept. of State for the security engineering officer positions with less qualifications than I have now, but I missed the cutoff exam score. I’m really trying to work my way up to those higher level network operations jobs. Would those NOC technician positions be more likely to hire a college graduate with limited experience?

[rjluna2]

The only way you will gain the position to start somewhere in low level until you have gain experience with computers and whatnot. I have been in the computer industry for about 35 years and still like get my hands dirty with broken desktop computers to make it work again. I'm currently as help desk along with repairing their machines.

[debs3759]

My mate fell into his IT career. He dropped out of uni in his 30s coz he couldn't afford to live on the loans, went to work as a courier. Got banned from driving for speeding too often to finish his rounds, got work in the warehouse. Heard that they couldn't fix a problem on their computers, so he fixed it for them. From that beginning, he went on to do various developer jobs for up to £600 a day (contract work), and is about to start a 2 year minimum job as a manager. of a team overseeing a major mobile network contract. So he got into it by getting banned from driving