Network and Computer Systems Administrators
Install, configure, and maintain an organization's local area network, wide area network, data communications network, operating systems, and physical and virtual servers.
Salary distribution (US)
Real salary data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The p10–p90 spread tells you more than the median alone.
Top skills
Knowledge you'll build
- Computers and Electronics
- Telecommunications
- English Language
- Customer and Personal Service
- Engineering and Technology
- Administration and Management
- Mathematics
- Education and Training
A day in the life
You begin each morning by checking monitoring dashboards and overnight alert logs for any server outages, disk-space warnings, or failed backups that need immediate remediation. Your day is a mix of planned work like patching operating systems, provisioning new virtual machines, and configuring firewall rules alongside unplanned interruptions when a user reports a connectivity issue or a service goes down unexpectedly. You interact with helpdesk technicians, developers, and vendors, frequently hopping between a terminal window, a remote-management console, and the physical server room to swap out a failed drive or re-cable a switch. The satisfaction comes from keeping everything running so smoothly that nobody notices, but the on-call rotations and middle-of-the-night outage pages are a constant reality.
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