What counts as experience?

I'm currently a high school student wanted to be a system administrator. The biggest thing I see on most job advertisements is experience. What really counts has experience? Is running and configuring a test network for a couple years or is it actual work experience? If it is the latter how can you get experience?

Experience in the context of a job posting is where you are providing professional services typically involving remuneration. Nevertheless, remuneration is not always involved and an area where you might consider to develop experience.

A good way to look at it is whether or not the average person would consider it a job if you described it to them.

During an interview, setting up a personal network may be relevant during discussion but is unlikely to have much weight in your fit for the job.

Ways to get experience when you don't have any...

• Internships
• Work for low wages
• Pursue non-profit and volunteer opportunities
• Find an entry level position relevant to your career scope that does not have high experience requirements.

If you do not have an existing knowledge base and understand technology, you are unlikely to have much luck even with the aforementioned opportunities. Understanding would be developed by configuring things at home, reading, or even school. Universities often create opportunities where experience can be developed during your education.

What counts as experience?

• Patching production servers WITHOUT testing the patches first.
• Giving the anonymous internet user, Admin rights to your entire web server because it was easy and made everything work.
• Volunteering to be on-call for a conversion of ~10,000 workstations from OS/2 to Windows NT.
• Plugging a UPS INTO a master switch.
• Doing anything in your server rack during business hours and while the production servers are up and running.
• Thinking Lotus Notes was the best you could do.
• Replacing Lotus Notes with Groupwise.
• Using DCAF over SNA
• Doing anything over SNA
• Extolling the virtues of token ring while stroking your MAU.
• Trying to circumnavigate cisco.com
• Giving your users admin rights to their local computer.
• Having no controls in place to prevent your users from taking said computer home and letting their children download games on it.
• Using Windex(tm) on your brand-new LCD
• Ignoring anti-virus warnings.
• Ignoring "Are you sure you want to delete?" messages.
• Ignoring "Are you sure you REALLY WANT TO DELETE THIS?" messages.
• Standing within a 10' radius of a PRINTING IBM pedestal printer.
• Thinking one Laserjet 4 plus would be enough printer for an entire office building floor.
• Thinking the end-users could replace paper in the paper tray and toner in the same printer.
• Wearing white on the same day you realize the end-users don't know how to install toner.
• Not buying the VLA version of Filemaker for 100 users.
• Doing anything to anyone for any reason after 2:05 PM on Friday
• Having kick-ass personal plans on the weekend.
• Spending 4.32 agonizing hours trying to remedy a software issue BEFORE ever rebooting the machine.
• Drinking from an open beverage container in your server room.
• Seriously underestimating the amount of disk space virtualization actually needs.