I recently accepted a Junior Systems Administrator position with the same company after about three years on the help desk. I also spent roughly a year serving as a team lead focused on reporting and weekly operational meetings, and I have around seven to eight years of total help desk experience.
As part of onboarding, I'll be completing AZ-900 first, followed by training on MECM and Windows Server 2022. For people who have made a similar move into systems administration, what do you wish you had known or done when you started? I'd especially appreciate advice about mindset, technical skills, documentation, mistakes to avoid, and making the transition successfully.
2 Answers
Congratulations! The biggest adjustment is learning to think beyond individual break-fix tickets. Start looking at the larger environment: what can be automated, upgraded, documented, secured, or improved before it becomes an outage? Learn how the systems depend on one another and try to understand why something works, not just which steps fix it. It’s completely normal not to know everything, but being able to research effectively and ask good questions is essential.
Be careful with production changes. Test in a lab or virtual machine when possible, make sure you have a rollback plan, and triple-check anything that could affect everyone. A backup only counts once you’ve successfully tested a restore. Understand your virtualization platform early, learn where the important backups are, and verify that fixes survive a reboot instead of assuming the problem is permanently solved.
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