A system administrator is part of a team to keep a DP system up and running. Typical responsibilites of a system administrator includes the following:
A system administrator job typically requires a bachelor’s degree in computer science, plus years of experience performing the mentioned duties.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects a healthy growth of system administrator job availability. This reasoning is partially based on the number of DP systems that will be deployed in the next decade or so.
While the number of DP system to deploy is large, the number of jobs available can be affected by many factors. For example, even though off-shoring is not an option for secure systems or systems that need very high availability, smaller DP systems can and are off-shored now. This means that the actual hardware of a DP system can be in a different region of the world.
There are emerging technologies that also reduce the number of system administrators. For example, virtualization permits a “virtual” server to move from failing hardware to healthy hardware on-the-fly. The same technology also permits real-time mirroring that improves availability. Together with less expensive hardware and more automated system monitoring and “healing” software, the demand of system administrators gradually reduces (for the same complexity and scale).
On the other hand, the technical knowledge that is expected from a system administrator continues to increase as technologies progress at a high speed. This is especially the case in the areas of computer security, open source products and virtualization. Although much of this knowledge is acquired on the job, having an education background of a bachelor’s degree in computer science is a minimum.