No certifications, no degrees, just good, old fashioned 15 years of experience.

None, anymore.

Eventually you end up with a resume/knowledge that sells itself.

I'm not talking about government jobs that require certain certs, though.

The only certification I have is from the Kansas City Barbeque Society, allowing me to act as a judge in BBQ competitions.

Things are probably different nowadays, but at least 15-25 years ago you could just apply for IT jobs and if someone lied about their skills it would hopefully show during the technical interviews. I don't know if that counts as getting in very early.

No certs and degree isn't in CS. I just have lots of experience.

My pathway was basically:

1. Got a low tier job as a glorified intern (paid)
2. Switched jobs a few times, pay increasing each time. Chose interesting jobs.
3. Left a low paying gov job for contract work. Got hired full time by one of my contractors.
4. Have stayed at that job. Golden handcuffs.

everyones just like, "10 years of experience"....nobody is hiring people without experience so people without experience cant get experience....i dont get it...

German here, no certs aswell

I got in to IT by just writing on my CV what I know I can do and what I learned in my free time.

Some company interviewed me, I could convince them that I really know a lot of stuff and that got me in.

Ever since then all I had where the companies I worked at and that was sufficient

I got dropped out from university. I got a Microsoft Azure Fundamental cert since then, now I'm a mixed Windows/Linux sysadmin at an SMB. YMMV, I'm in Europe btw.

My certs have all expired, but when I started I didnt have any at all.

The thing that worked for me was to apply to small businesses(Look into local MSPs). Places that have ~20 employees have much less rigor about certs and will more likely test that you're amicable enough to mesh with the rest of the team. From there you can build experience and often get thr company to pay for your certs.

I'm certifiably insane, have a doctorate in frustration, and many studies published of "Oh, fuck, what is this? I don't have time for this now, I have shit to get done".

Good luck.

Just a lot of experience.

In my anecdata (TO), all the sysadmins I know have a CS degree. I don't know many. Personally I haven't professionally been a sysadmin per se but I've done cloud infrastructure design, development and maintenance at scale and I do have a CS degree. A CS degree from a good school teaches a lot. Not so easy to get these days with the higher prices of everything.

See a lot of "no higher Ed, just learned from experience." any tips on things to do to gain more experience in sysadmin adjacent skills?

I like to think I'm quite competent with Windows/Linux, been a computer geek since I was really young, in a senior "tech support" position, but the kind of things I do at work are usually less advanced then the random side projects I do for fun... I'm basically the Linux guy for our group but that's not saying much as the support is next to 0 until you get to an actual product role.

It feels like you'd have to have the job to get the experience, but maybe I'm just not aware of what/if there are any particular projects or things to do that could help with more sysadmin side knowledge.

To give a quick easy example, I have a friend who just started a server maintence type role at a different company and was tasked with setting up a Linux server, she ran into several snags trying to set it up with the documentation she was provided by the company, I asked what distro was it, and what commands was she running? Turns out it was just that she waa given instructions for YUM rather then APT (it was Ubuntu) lol

I'm a self taught child of the 80s that loved to mess around with basic and serial modems when I could finally get 1.

Honestly, I got my first job by low balling the salary and knowing my shit enough to answer questions.

After 1 year I went to a new position paying double. And so on and so forth.

No certs just learning on the job + every IT/development class I could take in highschool

So funny that almost nobody got certs working in IT, same for me basically, I have a BA in Business Administration and thats it. ^^;

I have a WordPress site that I've been writing deep-dive linux articles on for about 10 years. Its more useful than any certification.

Portfolios showing experience are always more valuable than any sheet of paper.

No certificate now but if I was starting out I would get Red Hat certifications. Also Azure certs.

IMHO, a CS degree doesn't help you at all for sysadmin work but having a bachelors degree does. It is stupid but many employers have a bachelor's degree as a minimum requirement...regardless of what it was in.

none, I was just blessed with the role against my will because no one else was around

PhD in Quantum Optics

Still waiting for the day my education pays off.

No higher education, no certifications, just 10 years of experience on different IT job positions, raging from junior web dev to big DevOps projects.

In my experience (I'm in EU/PL) what matters most are actual technical skills and ability to demonstrate them on interview. I changed my job like 5 times and each time I aim for slightly more advanced work and slightly better revenue.

I'm fresh off the school bench myself, and work is now requiring us to take RHCSA, RHCE and Terraform certs. As we are consultants this is the only "proof" customers will trust when they choose us for various jobs.

So far so good though, starting with RHCSA and it's really good practice, especially for getting to know the ins and outs of the Linux system(RHEL). The learning material (the official stuff from red hat) is also very thoughtful, with theory, quizzes, guides and labs.

Best of luck 🙌

No relevant degrees, just lots of demonstrable experience and projects.

I have an unfinished Software Engineering degree. While studying, I started a small businesses to do some freelance IT work on the side and one client offered me a full-time job, so I put the studies on hold and then never looked back. Been climbing through different positions and companies since then. Experience is valued much higher than a diploma, especially in an industry that evolves too quickly for education to keep up. I quit the industry recently to start teaching, because there is huge need for teachers that can teach programming, and working with people is much more rewarding than a big paycheck (imo).

In all of my job interviews, I've been asked more about the company I started while studying, than the degree that I quit. So I guess my tip is to start your own thing or start teaching. Having your own business with a license also makes it way easier for big companies to hire you for contract work.

I have a Sec+ but that's just a job requirement; the only parts of the test that I've actually used were public/private key cryptography, and even then I was just dumbing it down to explain to end users. Otherwise it's all just experience.

Degree requirements are mostly there to satisfy HR (and can probably be waived in most cases), IT is realistically a trade profession.

Nothing current.

But I know what I know and I am very upfront with things I need to learn. One of those two things must be getting me positive results.

Wait! I have ITILv4. Go me.

Where I live, a lot of smallish companies look for people with experience rather than certificates or degrees. I‘m a hobbyist turned professional and it shows. I cant talk any of the jargon but I handle servers well and I make short work of most small company IT problems. That and the ability to think in business processes works well.

No university degree, did an apprenticeship 14 years ago in germany. It was three days a week of learning sysadmin things within a company (Windows, Linux, network devices) and two days a week of school, where the theoretical stuff was taught.

After 3 years, I was a newbie sysadmin and capable of managing Windows and Linux environments. I did no further certifications back then.

Over time, especially since I wanted to move more towards Linux, automation, containers and cloud native things from 2022 on, I did some certifications (LFCS, RHCSA, RHCE) which helped me to land a job where I now work 100% with Linux and containers and kubernetes.

I did it to:

• learn the things I had experience on from the ground up and fix the all the "holes" I never had to work with before in the day to day job and get a verification of my skills.
• learn additional things that were not part of the apprenticeship but are useful as a sysadmin today (automation, containers, git, etc)

I'm still learning to build up knowledge of kubernetes and will eventually take exams on that topic as well.

However, there are certifications with questionable value to them (in my opinion), like multiple choice tests for single tools or the like.

I'm a fan of performance based lab exams, where you get 20 tasks from all the scopes of the product to solve and have to actually apply the knowledge you gained to pass the exam by solving real world problems.

By learning for those kinds of exams, you cover a product or technology - almost - 100%. Unlike learning by experience only, which can be very individual. You can for example totally manage 10 linux hosts with ansible for 10 years without ever having to use facts, roles, etc. Just by writing very big playbooks.

Does that qualify for 10 years of ansible experience?

In reality, companies have a certain size and use-cases, so you'll do the absolute minimum to get something running/implemented securely (most of the time, I know there are exceptions). So imho certifications provide a birds eye view and force you to learn different areas of the product, which may be very useful, out of scope, etc.

But just passing a certification exam once doesn't equal years of real experience either. It's a mixed topic. For a point in time, you knew enough to pass the exam, so if your certification is still valid, it would be reasonable to assume you still know what you're doing, that's all.

My rhcsa expired and I only have experience beyond that. Your task right now is to find a job and the easiest way to do that is to leverage your network. If you don't have a network, you need to prove that you can commit to a long term plan and learn a skill. Most people do that with degrees. Unfortunately a lot of people have degrees and technology is getting more competitive. That's where you see school competitions and certifications. If you don't want to do that, you'll need to be able to speak competently to the role.

Unfortunately right now I do not recommend platform/devops/sre for anyone breaking into the field. If I create an application today, it's server less or bring your own dockerfile on a provided machine image. So what are you administrating? Legacy shops will be around for decades, but the future here is layered architecture not os tasks.