I recently moved from a 1.5-year L1 Help Desk role into a junior systems administrator position at a small, cloud-focused company. I have an AZ-104 certification and was told during the interview that I would get opportunities to work with Azure and more advanced infrastructure.
After two months, most of my work is still onboarding and offboarding support, PC provisioning, Outlook troubleshooting, and other typical desktop-support tasks. I have received admin access to a few tools, including our RMM platform, endpoint security software, and Intune, but I still have little or no access to Azure, AWS, most of Microsoft 365, or network equipment. Even routine offboarding actions often require my senior colleague to disable accounts or reset passwords for me.
Recently, my senior colleague and I investigated why the office was receiving only half of its expected internet bandwidth. We identified the access point as the likely cause, but only my colleague had the credentials to check the configuration and ultimately fix the issue. He received the recognition, and I felt overlooked because I had contributed to diagnosing the problem. I have also noticed that more advanced tasks are sometimes assigned to him without me being included, which makes me worried that I will remain stuck doing basic support work.
My manager recently left, and a replacement will be starting soon. The team and company culture are otherwise good, and my manager did give me Intune responsibilities, so I have had some opportunities to learn. Still, I am unsure whether I am simply being impatient after two months or whether I should be more proactive about requesting access and asking to shadow advanced work.
How would you approach this conversation with my senior colleague and new manager? How long would you wait before considering the limited access and lack of involvement a red flag, and what should I focus on in the meantime?
4 Answers
Be proactive within your current responsibilities. Volunteer for projects such as the Intune rollout, write documentation, investigate recurring issues, improve onboarding and offboarding procedures, and ask to shadow network or cloud changes. When you solve something, send a concise summary to your manager explaining the problem, your contribution, and the result. That creates visibility without making it seem like you are competing with your senior colleague.
Two months is still very early, and many companies intentionally give new employees limited permissions until they have demonstrated how they handle systems and risk. Passing a certification does not automatically mean someone should receive broad administrative access. Keep building trust through the work you have, document your progress, and show that you can handle tasks carefully and consistently.
Have a direct but non-confrontational conversation with your senior colleague. Explain that you want to contribute to infrastructure work, ask to be included when appropriate, and offer to perform tasks under supervision. Frame it around becoming useful and giving the team more coverage, rather than around feeling entitled to credentials. It also helps to ask for a development plan: which systems you can learn first, what access you can earn, and what skills they want you to demonstrate.
Mention that having more people trained on critical systems also gives the team resilience when someone is sick, on vacation, or leaves the company.
Access policies vary dramatically between organizations. Some places give junior staff broad administrator rights immediately, while others follow least privilege and require supervised experience first. Neither approach automatically means the company is mishandling your career. The warning sign would be a repeated refusal to discuss a path forward, no meaningful learning opportunities, or promises of broader responsibilities that never materialize. Give the new manager time to settle in, then revisit the issue with specific goals and a timeline before deciding whether to look elsewhere.
You do not necessarily need full access to learn. Ask for read-only access, a test environment, screen-sharing during changes, or delegated permissions for specific tasks.
It can feel slower than expected, but limited access is often a normal part of learning how a particular environment is designed.