Tuesday, May 13, 2008

If you're wondering what to do as a career

I'm going to suggest you look into being a Mac Server Administrator.  Looking around at what's out there in the market and where the jobs are currently coming up, it's starting to look like an abundance of Mac-centric positions and nowhere near enough skilled people to fill these positions.  Now, to be clear, I'm not talking about needing people to troubleshoot iPhoto and be able to diagnose a dead battery in an LCII - I mean hardcore full on server administrators.  People who understand corporate and enterprise IT best practices, who comprehend server infrastructure, doesn't shy away from terms like DNS, LDAP, IMAP, SMTP, AD, HTTP, SSL, AFP, SMB, FTP etc etc etc...  If you're just starting out, go take a look into training, and find yourself a copy of OS X Server - really the only way to learn this stuff is to use it.  Get yourself a home server, try running your own directory system, run your own mail server, host your own website... once you've rebuilt it a few times (after you broke it) and you're on your way to ACTC you're ready to put your foot into the pond of jobs that are coming up.  You may only start out as front-line support - dealing mostly with end-users, but it'll get you in front of the guys & gals that are doing the heavy lifting and if you show your worth on the front line you'll get called up to help out with the server stuff when you're ready.  So yes, you need to be technically minded, but if you're determined enough to learn, people can learn all sorts of things.  Look at me - I'm a heavy-lifting server gal, and where was my education?  Oh yeah - I'm the one with a degree in Music...
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