Laid off from non-profit job. Can I transition into Linux sysadmin work?

I moved from working in a non-profit where my technical work was not the nominal point of my job to working in the for-profit technology industry in primarily technical roles. It can absolutely be done (and yes, the pay is much better even at the entry level). Here would be my recommendations, which are all based on my experience in the US, and thus may or may not be applicable:Add some numbers to your CV, if they are impressive numbers. How many clients were you supporting? How many servers? One-time setup of a nagios instance to watch one server that rarely goes down is one thing, setting up nagios and munin for a few dozen or hundred client boxes is a different thing. If you've done the latter, you should talk about it because it will help employers take you more seriously.Icecast and streaming are much rarer and more specialized skills to have than Apache, PHP, Postgres, etc. Since it sounds like this is a pretty big part of your job I'd consider breaking the streaming stuff into its own bullet point with a bit more detail of what you've done, and maybe looking in particular for jobs that require these skills, since you'd be competing with a smaller pool of applicantsMany, many people I know who have sysadmin or "devops" jobs either do not have a degree or have an unrelated degree, so I don't think that is a huge stumbling block for you. It may disqualify you at certain bigger and more conservative companies, but there are many smaller companies that need sysadmins.If you know people working in the tech world, definitely put out some feelers there; a lot of these jobs are filled by word-of-mouth.Consider jobs other than traditional sysadmin roles which might use these skills. There are a lot of jobs where you need to know how to maintain or troubleshoot servers and networks that have other job titles than "sysadmin": enterprise software support, sales engineering, etc.

Learn how to interview, go on a few. If you aren't immediately picked up, make a note of the technical questions asked, and find out what you don't know in order to answer them next time, with full understanding. I have interviewed dozens of "senior" linux admins and I stump them with introductory questions (meant to spawn more questions) very very regularly. So if you are smart, and have your hands on the keyboard a lot, you can do this. The number of qualified candidates these days is very small. We want you here, trust me. If I can help, use teh mefi mail.

At least in the U.S., non-director-level people at non-profits make a wage that is considerably lower than they would doing equivalent work at a for-profit business. As well, keep in mind that they hired you as general office help and that probably set your wage low to begin with. So take both into consideration when applying for other work.

I'm surely not that underpaid, am I? Why would you think you weren't? It certainly sounds like you are.

I'm a Linux sys admin in the UK and have been helping to recruit on and off over the past year. As bensherman said, there aren't very many good candidates out there, and 90% of people we speak to fail when asked very simple questions. If you put those skills on your CV, and could answer questions like 'how do you install Apache? how do you setup a new vhost?' etc., you'll already be ahead of 90% of candidates. I suspect if you've been working at a small non-profit, you probably lack some experience required in lots of commercial positions (e.g. working with a large estate, configuration management, large infrastructure projects, high availability etc), so you might be looking for a junior to mid level position for a year or two, but I would think you could advance quite quickly in the right company. Other skills/knowledge for interviews are good communication (you may be required to explain a failed database at 3AM to your manager, what impact it has had, and how you're going to fix it/how long it will take), general Linux, computing and networking knowledge beyond the high level services (e.g which schedulers are most suitable for a database server, what's LVM, describe a Linux boot process, how does DNS work etc...). Feel free to mefi mail me if you have any specific questions.

I think one of the things I'm feeling is that the skill set doesn't justify such a high wage. I'd feel guilty asking for £25-35k for the sort of thing I've listed above, because it just doesn't feel that challenging to me. Every time I try to read the bulleted list of your responsibilities, my eyes glaze over because I don't understand a single word of it. You have skills, specialized skills, and you are apparently good at using them. Don't sell yourself short, literally.

One thing that will likely be different at a for-profit company is that there will be more of everything. Maybe you will be in charge of 1500 machines instead of 15. Maybe you will be part of an effort to upgrade a version of some package on a running production system. That is making money. Design the runbook, try it out on multiple non-production machines. Figure out things that might go wrong. Get paged at night when things do go wrong. Be technically competent, and be able to communicate with other people. These are all valuable skills. I hear chef is popular these days.

Hi everyone - thanks for your great answers so far! I think one of the things I'm feeling is that the skill set doesn't justify such a high wage. I'd feel guilty asking for £25-35k for the sort of thing I've listed above, because it just doesn't feel that challenging to me. There are two options here - either it's really not that challenging and I'm clutching at straws, or it is quite challenging and involved and I just have an aptitude for it. Because I've never done anything outside of radio and never worked in the private sector where I have to justify my existence a bit more, it's quite difficult to work out which! http://ask.metafilter.com/263735/Laid-off-from-non-profit-job-Can-I-transition-into-Linux-sysadmin-work#3830186 Good Brain: I have had zero training, mentoring or professional development in my current job. Each time I've raised the subject, there's been "no budget for staff training," which is standard in the non-profit world. I started with an architecture left behind by previous staff (the organisation had 25 staff a few years ago and is now down to three) and re-worked it all with more modern tools to make it more efficient and less labour intensive to maintain, if that makes sense. I hope it does! I've had very little contact with Linux people or organisations in my local area outside of work - because work has been such a pain for over a year, and I've spent twelve months firefighting and worrying about whether I'll get paid, I've not had a lot of time or energy to socialise or network. That's a negative, I know - but hopefully the light is at the end of the tunnel, now.

I believe you, but it's not me you'll have to convince. Sure, if the firm goes under shortly after you leave, okay, hiring managers can probably figure it out, but I doubt they'll find out a press release stating your firm is taking a 20 percent across the board layoff.