You hear arguments all the time on the secrets to getting promoted in any field, but the truth is promotions require an increase in value to the table and IT career growth is no different. If you bring the same value as your co-workers, then expect equal pay.
The same is also said for those who get certifications but never really find new values to bring to the table. Just because you pass your MCSE or CCNP doesn't mean your job will benefit from this.
It would be best if you learned not to be afraid of the command line. Memorize commands and create scripts that help you remember what you struggle to complete, such as long tasks with vast steps. If you do a job more than once, have the mentality to automate this. Merging automation with command-line skills go hand and hand. This alone won't get you promoted, though.
So how can you add more value to your position? The secret word here is automation but with a cache. Implementing automation is useless if you don't spend that extra time improving current operations. Let's touch on a few examples of this.
Let's say every Monday, and you are tasked with uploading files to a server. This task takes 5 minutes. Simply automating this process won't get you a raise. But if you find out that this process tends to have standard errors, then automating this process completes the task regularly and removes the fear of human error.
Taking things to the next level, spending this extra time, otherwise spent on this one job process, can be used to implement more innovative solutions. You could create a dashboard that analyzes daily data on your servers. You could create scripts that monitor tasks that run commands that troubleshoot your issues and even send you a report of the troubleshoot instead of a simple alert.
But when you implement automation, you must implement error handling. You have to write in your scripts tasks that check for files and verify commands run successfully, even if there is no error output. Additionally, you must have a paper trail and write out comments in your scripts to help admins troubleshoot when your script has issues.
Once you open up the world of automation, the sky is your limit. But automation without intent to improve your environment is useless. Continue working and improving your network.
Here is a list of significant tasks you can conquer with automation.
* Create a tool that runs on every server and outputs the results to a centralized database or CSVs. (Make sure you append your data correctly if using a single source such as a file).
* Create monitoring tasks that run scripts when alerts pop up, such as low disk reports, instead of a list of the drives without knowing what files need to be cleared.
* Job tasks such as file uploads, restarting servers on a scheduled basis, software deployments, and upgrades.
* User clean up such as inactive accounts that haven't logged in for X amount of days.
* Finding services that run on expensive servers and replacing them. This task is more difficult, but if you only use Windows for DNS, replace it with Bind and write admin automation scripts for creating and deleting entries.
* Patch server clean up tools - tasks that run and keep your patch servers from overloading with outdated patches.
* Integration with cloud services such as offsite storage in a very affordable way. This can be performed by just writing a script that copies a weekly backup to a cloud storage provider.
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