Land System Administrator Jobs in 4 Easy Steps with this SysAdmin Resume Writing Guide

If you want to land a System Administrator job and get paid a top Systems Administrator salary, you need to know how to write a System Administrator resume. This guide will not only teach you how to create an eye-catching System or Network Administrator resume, it will actually do most of the work for you, while still helping you create a unique document that is yours and yours alone.christian louboutin deutschland,cheap ralph lauren shirts,cheap louis vuitton bags uk,cheap michael kors handbags,cocktail dresses cheap

I, the founder of the Resume to Interviews team, could have easily compiled another 20,000 words on this subject. Our team has helped over 5,000 clients with their resumes and CVs since 2007 and have learned a lot about resume best practices. We hope not only will this advice help you secure a System Admin job or Network Admin job, the lessons and much of the sample content it provides can also be used to create effective Database Administrator, Network Engineer, SAN Administrator, Computer Operator, and Web Administrator resumes and CVs, just to name a few.

The first step is to write a well-targeted summary. So let’s get started!

Step 1: Summarize Your Skills and Experience, Not Your Goal

You may have heard that resumes should start with an “Objective” describing the applicant’s goal.

Do not do this.

If somebody is reading your resume, they know that your objective is to land a job at their company. Explaining that your objective is to get a System  Administrator job on a System Administrator resume is not only redundant, it’s a waste of space, and most importantly, it eliminates your chance to make a good first impression and “hook” the reader.

Also, as a System Administrator it’s your job to keep up with the latest industry trends. The first thing on your resume should not be an outdated piece  of resume writing history like the “Objective Statement.” Instead, you should use a “Summary of Qualifications” or “Profile”, which explains your abilities relative to the job you are seeking. This means it is going to contain the experience and skills that you have which are the most relevant to the position.

Read the difference between an objective statement and a summary of qualifications statement.

Read the difference between an objective statement and a summary of qualifications statement.

Objective Statement:  Bad Example

• “To obtain a position working with advanced systems and technical infrastructures.”

Summary of Qualifications: Good Examples

• A System Administrator with ten years of enterprise-level work experience, specializing in the design, implementation, maintenance, and support of large scale IT infrastructures.
• An Information System Administrator here  with eight years of infrastructure support work experience, specializing in the implementation, management, and maintenance of servers, software, equipment, and LAN, WAN, and MAN networks.
• A System Administrator with three years of technical support and administration experience, specializing in the implementation, management, and support of Windows-based server and desktop roles.
• A Linux System Administrator with four years of system deployment and management work experience, specializing in the planning, development, design, deployment, monitoring, and support of IT hardware and software.

The summary or profile should mirror the desired experience, skills, and requirements in the job posting (hint: Indeed.com and LinkedIn are the best websites to find job openings) while accurately describing your skills and experience. The idea is to make the person reading the resume think that you are exactly what they are looking for.

As a side note, if you have been a System Administrator or Network Engineer for a long time, you may be tempted to load the summary with every piece of equipment, software, or skill you’ve ever used. Do not do this. It is a surefire way to have your resume tossed aside, because when you try to say everything, you end up saying nothing.

Instead, pick the two or three most important general concepts and list those. Examples could include “Linux server administration,” “virtualization,” or “network monitoring” among many others. You want to communicate your main selling points to that particular employer. If you are an experienced Systems Administrator or IT professional, you might have a longer resume with a lot of impressive accomplishments spread throughout.

In this case, you might want to add a “Career Highlights” section directly underneath the Summary Statement. This will allow the reader to see your summary and immediately know your background and skills, and then see your most important accomplishments in the first few seconds of looking at your document.  If you use a “Career Highlights” section, make sure the highlights you list are concrete accomplishments that have numbers to support them. Avoid filler and clichés.

For example: Career Highlights:

• Led a six-member System Administration team that maintained 99% uptime for an international financial network with 5K users.
• Oversaw a site migration for ninety users while achieving zero network downtime.
• Managed a $1MM desktop, server, application, and telecom inventory by tracking employee equipment assignments and purchase, billing, and decommission dates.

Obviously, if you don’t have highlights that are worth separating from the rest of the bullet points, then don’t use a “Career Highlights” section. This should also only be used if you want to cherry pick the best things from several jobs and put them on the top of your resume. If you only have one or two relevant jobs, this isn’t necessary.

Step 2: Create Great Content by Quantifying Your Accomplishments and Demonstrating Skills (or Just Play Mad Libs with this List)

Once the summary or profile is in place, add your degree, certifications, and work history. You should create a section for each. Arrange them in order of importance. Usually this will mean certifications first and then work history.

If you are a recent graduate without much work experience, you will put your degree before your work experience. If you have work experience, put that before your degree.

The most difficult part of writing a resume is creating the bullet points and content for individual System Administrator jobs. System Administrators do so many different tasks that it can be difficult to know what to add and what to leave out. You have to show specific technical knowledge while making sure the resume is readable. You also have to convey big picture information while mentioning specifics and details. This is all a careful balancing act.

We are going to show you exactly how to maintain that balance. One of the most common mistakes you can make on your System Administrator resume is presenting it as a giant list of every software or equipment you’ve ever used. There’s a place for that in the technical skills section. (We’ll get to that later.) But when you present an employer with a massive list of names, concepts, and buzzwords with little context, you are relying too much on them to make the connection between what you list and what you use it to do. If you mention a particular software or type of equipment like Dell PowerEdge servers or Active Directory, you need to show that you actually know how to use it. Each point should contain:

• A: The software/equipment used whenever possible.
• B: What you actually used it to do.
• C: The results/improvements, if applicable.

You also want to start each job’s content with a general, overarching bullet point that introduces the reader to the job and your responsibilities there. This accomplishes something very important: setting the context.

If someone is reading a resume and trying to figure out the scope of your responsibilities or what kind of company you worked for as they are reading the bullet points then you have a problem. If that is happening, then the reader isn’t actually reading the bullet points to understand your skills and accomplishments, they are reading them to understand what the job was. That’s if they keep reading at all; often a bunch of data without context is enough to get a resume tossed. Establish scope and context in the first bullet point. Specifically, that first bullet point should establish:

The scope of your responsibility. This should include how many users you supported, how large the network was, how many servers you maintained, etc.

What kind of company you worked for and how large it was.

How many people under you or how large the team you were on was.

The bullet points that follow will highlight the accomplishments you achieved, the skills and tools you used, and the impact you had on the business while fulfilling that responsibility, Have you ever played mad libs?

That’s basically what we are going to do right now, except the end result won’t be a funny story, it will be resume content that clearly and elegantly communicates your skills and experience to potential employers.

Paste the content below under each job on your resume. Then insert the correct numbers and details in the blank spaces. Delete any bullet points that don’t apply to your experience. The base of a good job description is all here. You only need to edit the details to personalize your resume.

Your most recent job will typically have the most content. If you end up repeating content across multiple jobs, delete the duplicate content from the older jobs and leave it in the newest one. You want to show that you are adding responsibilities as you progress in your career, and you want to show that your knowledge is fresh and up to date. That’s why duplicate content goes in the newest job. System Administrator Job Description Mad Libs Guide:

Underline = replace specific details with your own

Bold = replace numbers with your own

Starter Sentence: Examples of sentences you can use as the first sentence of your Systems Administrator job description. Choose one that is the closest to your experience and change the details.

• Managed data center operations and resolved ten daily third-tier technical support tickets for a medium sized, high density data center specializing in fully managed external infrastructures for 273 Fortune 500 and small business clients.
• Managed and trained three Technicians providing internet, VoIP, co-location, and network systems support to 300 clients, including Checkpoint, Wikimedia, PS Print, Groupon, and Roku, for a B2B ISP and services integrator.
• Deployed eight physical and virtual clouds for seventy Developers producing custom Big Data analytics software for municipal governments.
• Managed and maintained fifty Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2 servers and the VMware server infrastructure for a credit union with fourteen branches and 495 users as part of a three-member Network Team.
• Troubleshot and resolved up to twenty Linux-based support issues per week for hundreds of PPTP, L2TP, and OpenVPN clients of a Private Internet Access service with an infrastructure of over 800 servers.
• Installed and maintained the workstations, servers, printers and networking equipment, including switches, routers, firewalls and proxy devices, for a naval ship with over 700 military personnel.
• Administered network cabling, NIPRNet and SHF telecommunications devices, including Super High Frequency, Nonsecure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) computers, and COMSEC equipment.
• Designed, implemented, and maintained the company server and network infrastructure supporting eighty users at an e-commerce retailer.
• Administered and maintained an IT infrastructure for a 25-bed critical access hospital with seventy Windows servers, over 300 workstations, and technical business equipment, including networked devices, document scanners, printers, and a PBX phone system.

Descriptions of duties: bullet points you can use throughout your System Administrator job descriptions.

• Performed desktop, laptop, and system maintenance, security updates, security audits, and machine hardening.
• Maintained a collocated datacenter with over twenty Windows and Linux servers, a VMWare virtualization cluster, and technical business equipment, including a wide-area network, document scanners, printers, and VoIP PBX phone system.
• Received a “commendable” rating on security practices and procedures from DSS Inspectors.
• Setup and maintained network infrastructure for two offices, which included a RADIUS server for wireless authentication using the Virtualbox virtualization software.
• Setup and maintained an OpenVPN server, the Redmine project management application, and a Gitlab code repository on Windows Server 2008 Hypervisor and Ubuntu 12.04 virtual servers.
• Conducted set ups, equipment purchasing, and security in-processing for ten new hires with JPAS.
• Migrated and maintained web environments.
• Resolved WAN and LAN connectivity issues, public and private IP assignments, and DNS changes.
• Created and maintained the company asset inventory for all computer hardware with Microsoft Excel.
• Evaluated and selected a new company email system by researching and identifying potential systems, creating and administering user test groups, gathering system user feedback through interviews and surveys, and selecting and preparing the implementation of new systems while negotiating with vendors.
• Identified, researched, and negotiated the purchase of $25K worth of hardware from five vendors.
• Developed and implemented a cloud computing system with six hardware nodes by researching, selecting, and negotiating the purchase of $13K worth of hardware, building and configuring laptops, and training users.
• Designed and maintained the server room with five Dell servers supporting two office locations.
• Set up and maintained company tools, including VTC, IP-based phone and conference systems, and mobile phones.
• Maintained 99.99% uptime by conducting server maintenance, updates, and patches.
• Wrote and collected documentation and maintained the Standard Operating Procedures, knowledge base, and FAQs.
• Monitored and controlled blades and enclosures using HP BladeSystem Onboard Administrator and Cisco Unified Computer System Manager.
• Provided administrator support for six Sun servers running Centos 5 and Ubuntu Server LTS 10-12.
• Created standardized equipment deployments for customers, including network switches, modems, and routers, saving entire days of support and planning for each deployment.
• Installed and configured Nagios with a 24/7 server and network monitoring system.
• Performed primary Windows and Linux server administration tasks, including setup, installation, OS patching, data backup, user account management and access control.
• Deployed an internal wiki used by fifteen Engineers and the company CEO which included server and workstation inventories and roles, step-by-step guides to generate daily reports, and vendor information.
• Performed cost/benefit analyses while researching and selecting hardware vendors for services and devices.
• Performed feasibility studies on network distribution technology based on cost and the time needed to acquire and install the hardware during purchasing recommendations for management.
• Tracked and monitored the security of $500K worth of IT assets through a proprietary ticketing system.

Step 3: Organize Your Content (Be a Jack and a Master of All Trades)

If you’ve been working in IT and technical fields for a long time, especially with a smaller company, you may describe yourself as a “jack of all trades.” Maybe you’ve also heard of the old saying “jack of all trades, master of none.” This

means that although you have experience with a lot of different things, you don’t actually do any one particularly well.

This creates a problem.

We want to show a wide range of skills, but we don’t want to give the impression of far-reaching superficial knowledge. So if you have lots of bullet points, like more than half a page, and it’s all good and relevant content, you need to organize that information so it’s not a “wall of text” that ends up making the reader’s eyes glaze over.

To avoid that, create between two and four categories and use them to organize the bullet points. This will both reinforce the idea that you have a few primary areas of knowledge and expertise, while simultaneously showing a wide range of skills and accomplishments that can be easily scanned by the reader.

Think about your work experience and look at your bullet points. Come up with three categories that you can distribute the bullet points among while keeping each category roughly equal in size. Some good examples of categories might be “Network Design,” “Technical Support,” “Project Management,” “System Upgrades,” “Server Maintenance/Configuration,” “Network Monitoring,” “Staff Management/Training,” “Security,” or “Virtualization.”

Ideally, the categories will also reflect the skills most highly valued by the employers you want to work with (look at the jobs listings to see what these are). This is another example of something, like the summary, that should communicate your experience relative to the jobs you want to apply to. The categories don’t have to be perfect, but they should be relevant. They also shouldn’t overlap.

For example, having a “Management” category and a “Project Management” category isn’t that helpful, even though they are technically different things. The individual bullet points might be relevant to multiple categories, but the titles of the categories should be clearly delineated. Distribute the bullet points among the categories you’ve created. Then rearrange the bullet points so that the most important and impressive descriptions are at the top. After that, order the categories in terms of importance as well.

The most important category on top, least important on bottom. Remember the general bullet point we talked about, the one that sets the context for everything? We are still going to use that first. We are going to put it above the categories. This will serve as an introduction to the categories and bullet points that follow. You might even use two bullet points to set the context and describe the overall responsibilities above the categories. The end result should look something like this:

• Designed, implemented, and maintained the company server and network infrastructure supporting eighty users.
• Configured, implemented, and administered two domain controllers, a Storage Area Network (SAN) server, a Linux development server, a SIMS database server, and domain and collaboration tools.

Hardware Design and Implementation:

• Developed and implemented all IT solutions, including internet connection and IP phone systems, for an office location with forty staff.
• Evaluated and selected a new company email system by researching and identifying potential systems, creating and administering user test groups, gathering system user feedback through interviews and surveys, and selecting and preparing the implementation of new systems while negotiating with vendors.
• Identified, researched, and negotiated the purchase of $25K worth of hardware from five vendors.
• Developed and implemented a high performance, low-cost cloud computing system with six hardware nodes by researching, selecting, and negotiating the purchase of $13K worth of hardware, building and configuring Dell laptops and Apple MacBook Pros, and training users.
• Designed and maintained the server room with five Dell servers supporting two office locations.

Network Security:

• Ensured IA compliance as directed by the NISPOM using software tools provided by the Defense Security Service (DSS) to audit the company classified laptop for security vulnerabilities and recommend courses of action.
• Managed the pilot encryption program for company computer assets that ensured compliance with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), and evaluated and tested encryption solutions from four vendors.
• Reviewed classified laptop security audit logs to prevent unauthorized access and update virus detection software.
• Performed weekly system security audits, wrote the company System Security Plan (SSP), and built security infrastructure and alarm systems in coordination with the Facility Security Officer as the Information Systems Security Manager.

Technical and System Support:

• Provided the day to day operation and management of the IT network while resolving ten daily user technical support cases for eighty internal staff located across Virginia, Maryland, and Florida locations.
• Set up and maintained company tools, including VTC, IP-based phone and conference systems, and mobile phones and blackberries.
• Created and maintained company asset inventory for all computer hardware with Microsoft Excel and a hardware based Dell Asset Management Appliance.
• Managed and secured software licensing agreements and communicated changes in requirements to company Representatives and Vendors.
• Developed the standard baseline hardware configuration for laptops and servers.
• Created documentation for new and existing users on computer and network service use, and wrote the monthly IT column for the company newsletter.
• Delivered bi-monthly training meetings for forty staff to introduce new features and upcoming changes.
• Conducted bi-weekly time critical maintenance and repairs on essential communications equipment such as routers and switches, VOIP and POTS telephones, computers, and encryption devices.
• Provided telephone and email support for 35 weekly help desk issues, including desktop, laptop, printer, software, telephones and networking issues.

Step 4. Create a System Administrator Technical Skills Section (Because Robots Read Resumes Too)

Now the only thing left to do is create a section called “Technical Skills.” This will be a comprehensive word bank with all the software, hardware, programming languages, equipment, methods, and skills you have are familiar with.

Now the only thing left to do is create a section called “Technical Skills.” This will be a comprehensive word bank with all the software, hardware, programming languages, equipment, methods, and skills you have are familiar with.

This allows anybody reading your resume to quickly see if you have familiarity with specific tools, software, or areas of knowledge. Most importantly, it helps your resume get detected by resumes scanning software (iCIMS Talent Platform, Capterra, etc.), therefore increasing the chances that your resume will end up in the hands of a real live human being.

In this day and age, you need to be writing your resume with this kind of software in mind. If you don’t, your resume might never actually get rid by a flesh and blood person. This kind of software absolutely exists and companies use them, especially large corporations. Although you do want to be thorough about your skills and technological proficiencies, you do not want to spam hiring managers with technologies and concepts you barely know. Like all resume content, the information in this section should be targeted at the jobs you are seeking.

So what terms should you use? How should you organize these terms? Good questions, but once again, we have you covered. A starter list of skills you need is just below. Copy and paste these into your resume. Then go through and delete anything that doesn’t apply to you.

• Software: Microsoft Access,Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Lightroom, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Mac OSX, Faronics Deepfreeze, m0n0wall, pfSense, VNC, Ubuntu Linux, SketchUp, Wirecast
• Networking: Cisco Routers, Modems, Firewalls, NIC’s, WIC’s, Managed Switches, Hubs, Patch Panels, Relay Racks, VOIP Phones, Video Distribution, Network Wiring, DHCP, QoS, Active Directory, FTP, File Shares, Wireless Routers, Sophos/Astaro Unified Threat Management, Sonicwall
• Networking Routers: Cisco 17xx, 18xx, 28xx-Series, 7206VXR NPE-G1/NPE-G2, 650x-Series SUP720-3BXL, 760x Series RSP720-3CXL-10G, IOS 12.2 thru 12.5, Vyatta VC/VSE 6.3-6.5, Mikrotik RouterOS
• Firewalls: Cisco PIX 501, 506E, 515, PIX-OS 6.3, ASA 5505/5510 ASA v7.x & 8.x
• Switches: Catalyst 29xx-Series, ME3400, Netgear Managed Switches, Dell 54xx-Series Managed Switches, HP Procurve
• ADSL2+/VDSL2: Zyxel DSLAM and CPE Routers, Draytek ADSL2+ CPE Routers, Motorola-Netopia
• IPS/IDS: TopLayer E-5500, Ntop, Netflow
• Datacenter: Portmaster Serial Console Server, Avocent Cyclades Serial Console Server, APC Managed Power, Baytech Managed Power
• Concepts, Topology and Protocols: IPv4, IPv6, BGP, OSPF, TCP/IP, UDP, ICMP, NAT, MLPPP Bonding Over T1 and ADSL, Opt-E-Man Fiber Metro Ethernet, DS3/T3, ATM over DS3, T1/DS1 Over Channelized DS3, Traffic Shaping Using GTS/CBWFQ, VOIP QoS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, MAPI, FTP, SIP, RTP, XMPP, FTTP, 802.1q VLAN and VLAN Trunking, STP, 802.1ad Q-in-Q VLAN Stacking, PPTP VPN, IPsec VPN, BIND DNS, ARIN SWIP
• VoIP, PBX and Telephony: Communicate Pro VoIP PBX, Broadsoft VoIP PBX, Polycom IP Phones, SIP/RTP, Linksys SPA and PAP, Avaya IP Phones, Nortel PBX Norstar Key Systems, Adtran Total Access 9xx-Series Router & VoIP Gateway, ISDN T1-PRI, POTS
• Programming/Web development: PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, C++, Visual Basic, Java, SVN, PHP-cURL, SOAP (PHP NuSOAP), BashShell
• Server Operating Systems: Linux (RHEL 5/6, CentOS, Ubuntu Server, Debian), FreeBSD (8.x, 9.x), Windows (Server 2008 R2, 2008, 2003, 2000, NT 4.0) and Mac OS X Server.
• Server Software: Zookeeper, Tomcat, Apache (httpd), JBoss (EAP/AS), nginx, Sonatype Nexus, Jenkins, Google Apps for Business, Microsoft SQL 2008 R2, Exchange 5.5-2010
• Operating Systems: CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, RHEL, Ubuntu, OSX, Windows 3.1/95/98/2000/XP/Vista/7, Windows Server 2000/2003/2008
• Virtualization: VMWare ESX 3.5, VMware Infrastructure 3, vSphere (4.0-5.1), VMWare Workstation, MS Virtual PC, ESXi, P2V Migrations, KVM, OpenStack, Oracle Virtual Box, VirtualPC
• Storage: NetApp NFS, Dell SAS, RAID
• Servers: Dell PowerEdge, Supermicro, HP DL, Apple XServe
• Hardware: Servers, Desktops, Laptops, Direct Attached Storage, Mobile Devices (iOS, Android), Symbology RF Barcode Scanners, Thermal Printers
• System Analysis: Process Flow Analysis, Lean Manufacturing
• Windows Administration: Active Directory, Exchange 2003, 2007, Group Policy, IIS, MSSQL, Remote Access, Terminal Server, Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008
• Monitoring & Logging: Nagios, Ganglia, ELSA, AIDE, eEye Retina, Altiris, Microsoft SCCM
• Directory Services: Active Directory, Red Hat Directory Server, FreeIPA
• Automation & Deployment: Puppet, Foreman, Perl, Bash Scripting, Power Shell
• Traditional Databases: MySQL, Postgres
• NoSQL Databases: Hadoop (Apache tarballs, CDH3/4 & Hortonworks), CouchDB, MongoDB, Accumulo, MarkLogic
• Cloud/Virtual Hosting: Amazon EC2, Linode
• Management Tools: Symantec Management Platform 7, Altiris Deployment Solution 7, Altiris CMS 7, Ticketing Systems, Microsoft SCCM, FrontRange, Lansweeper, Kaseya
• MIS: Business Systems Analysis, Information Systems Design, Project Management
• Project Management: Risk Management, Progress Reporting, Project Facilitation, Budgeting, Retrospectives, Resource Planning, Scoping, Iterative Development and Planning, Project Scoping, Resource Identification, Budget Management, Timeline Management, Resource Identification, Risk Management, Change Management
• Server: Sendmail, Postfix, IIS, Apache, BIND, LAMP, FTP, DHCP, MySQL, SSL/TLS, CPanel, SMTP, SNMP
• Storage: Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, NAS, SAN
• Systems Analysis: Agile, Sequential, and Iterative methods of Analysis and Design, Object Oriented and Structured Systems Analysis Methods, Gathering Information, Documenting Business Process Workflow
• Windows Administration: Exchange, Active Directory, MSSQL
• Enterprise Systems Analysis and Integration: IS Analysis and Design, IS Infrastructure, Project Management, Change Management, Information Systems Design
• Technical Writing/Support: Problem Investigation, Documentation Creation, Training Curriculum, Technical Documentation, Quick Fact Guides
• Linux Administration: Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSE, LAMP Stack
• Content Management: FTP, WordPress, FOSWiki, Oracle Portal, Ek
• Security:GE Sapphire Pro Security Systems, Genesis Security Systems, Security Information Management System (SIMS), DVTel Video Surveillance, Lenel Access Control
• Networking: Active Directory, Cisco Systems Anyconnect, Cisco VPN Client, Juniper VPN Client, Virtual Networking Computing (VNC), Remote Desktop Connection (RDP), OpenVPN client and server
• Data Backup: FreeNAS, Cobian Backup, Crashplan Pro, Windows Backup Utility (Server 2008/7)
• Encryption: Wave Systems Endpoint Encryption, PGP, TruCrypt, Bitlocker

Once you have all the info that applies to you, try and cut it down to no more than half a page of the most relevant content. Then organize the categories the same as the bullet points: most impressive/important on top, lest important on bottom. However, by far the best method for identifying a list of skills is to search for terms online.

How Do I Fill Up the Rest of this Page?

How to Write a Resume for System Administrators With No Experience:

A lot of the advice given so far applies to people with all levels of experience, but I’m sure some of you are looking for help with creating a Systems Administrator resume specifically because you have zero experience in the field and don’t know how to fill a page with related, relevant content.

Maybe you are still in school and just about to graduate. Or maybe you just completed your networking certifications and are looking to get out of your current field. Either way, you can create an entry-level Systems Administrator resume that will be perfect for you.

First, an important note regarding certifications: As soon as you figure out when you are going to earn a specific certification, like the CompTIA Network+ or Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator (RHCSA) certification, list it.

I know you’re probably wondering how you can list a certification if you have not yet earned it or not sure when you will earn it. Well, there’s a simple way around that issue. Put the name of the certification, and after it put “Expected September 2014,” or whatever the appropriate month or year is.

This can always be changed later, and it has the advantage of showing employers that you have a plan to get these certifications, which is better than not listing it at all. Here are some examples:

You now have your certifications or future certifications listed, but if you don’t have any work experience, you are going to need some more content to fill up a whole page. To do that we are going to create a “projects” section. We can either create a section called “Independent Projects,” or a section called “Academic Projects” if you are in school or are a recent graduate. Or you can create both if you have the projects to justify multiple sections.

You are going to list projects you completed at school, in the course of getting your certifications, or on your own, and treat them like jobs you did. We aren’t going to trick anybody into thinking they were professional, but we are going to present them the same way in order to communicate relevant skills and technological proficiencies to potential employers. For each project, create a header that says what the project was (ex. “Virtual Server Build” or “Game Coding Project” ) and the time you worked on it (January 2012 – May 2012). Then write bullet points briefly describing the project and explaining how you used systems administration knowledge and skills. You might need to write some of your own bullet points to explain those experiences, but the same general concepts from the content above will work. Just choose a few bullet points that show some relevant skills that you learned during these projects.

Academic Projects

• Wrote a 48-page thesis identifying, analyzing, and comparing the base security architectures and histories of the iOS and Android mobile operating systems.
• Analyzed official reports and documentation from Apple and Google, as well as third party sources that identified security issues and detailed device architecture.
• Created and presented a twelve-minute tutorial video demonstrating the proper execution of the De-ICE 2.100 Penetration Test.
• Identified and prepared strategies to achieve specified penetration goals, including obtaining root access to target machines, and uncovering hidden files.

If you have been studying for the various certification tests at home and don’t have any experience at all, you could create an “Independent Projects” section that looks something like this:

Independent Projects

Combine all of this with a technical skills section and whatever non-related work experience you have, including the job you had waiting tables, and you should be able to fill up a page. You don’t want to spend bullet points and space describing unrelated jobs, but just showing you have actually worked before is better than nothing.

So there it is.

A well-written, detailed, and focused System Administrator resume or Network Administrator resume can secure you a well-paying position in nearly any industry. Healthcare, finance, entertainment: just about every industry needs System Administrators to design and maintain critical network infrastructure and systems. These jobs are everywhere, and the sad truth is that very few Systems Administrators know how to communicate their accomplishments and responsibilities effectively to both the HR people who read resumes (and have no technical backgrounds) and the IT Managers and Directors who are looking for specific technical skills and proficiencies.

The title “Systems Administrator” can apply equally to individuals with a wide range of experience. You could be the veteran Technician with twenty years of systems administration and engineering work experience, or you might be the Junior System Administrator who just earned their first Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA) or CompTIA certification.

Although the general principles for creating a great System Administrator resume will apply to all Systems Administrators, regardless of experience, this guide will teach how to distill many years of experience and technical knowledge into a concise document that highlights your most impressive accomplishments and most important skills.  Armed with an effective System Administrator resume and cover letter, you are going to receive emails and calls looking to set up interviews immediately, no matter how much or how little experience you have.

What do you think?

Five-thousand words about resume writing can look overwhelming at first glance. The truth is I can easily write another five-thousand words with even more advice on how to write the ideal resume. Who has the time to read that? I want to hear what you think is missing from this article. What advice would you give someone applying to Systems Administrator jobs and related fields?