As a number of my blog entries will attest, I really like drawing inspiration from sources outside of the typical system administration skill-set. I think that the technical aspects of our job are far easier than the “soft” stuff, or at least the “big picture” things.

When we start as inexperienced admins, we focus mostly on technical work. Ideally, we perform this work at the behest of our more experienced superiors, or less ideally, because there’s no one else to do it, and the company’s owner is telling you that the mail server is broken and that it needs fixed yesterday.

I still recall very well back when I was a first year administrator and Brett, our senior admin, would have me do some small bit of technical work. Usually it was to build a new service or rebuild an old one. I vividly remember wondering to myself why he was having me do these kinds of things. There was no outward indication that something was wrong, I hadn’t heard anyone suggest these new services. It just seemed like Brett was randomly having me do things.

It took some time before I got to the point where I could really see the forest for the trees. Brett wasn’t being reactive, he was being proactive. He could see impending problems and build solutions before they became emergencies. It took a long time of dealing with individual components of the network, then small subsets of services, then the entire infrastructure before I could see why he did what he did.

The valuable addition to my skill set wasn’t technical in nature. It was the ability to see the relationships of systems to each other. It was gained through perspective. I was looking at trees when I was building solutions, but Brett was looking at the forest when he’d direct me to do them.

Your goal as a System Administrator should be to get to the point where you see the forest. It’s not an overnight kind of thing, and it takes a lot of working on trees before you can see it, but you should be working toward that goal while you’re doing the grunt work.

I’ve thought about it, and I’ve identified three things that I think can help you to move into this architectual-type role. These aren’t the only things you should be doing (by far!), but if you do these three things, you will advance your analytic skills above and beyond someone who doesn’t.

Also, they might seem a little out of left field, but trust me, the skills that you gain from them will carry over into your eventual role as someone who deals with forests instead of trees.

Read Airline Accident Reports

Read Medical Case Reports

Write Reports of Your Own

Doing these things will not turn you into an amazing system administrator overnight, but taken together, they’ll provide excellent models of professional behavior that we should all work to emulate.

You don’t need to do any of these things to be good at your job, and I don’t want to give that impression. What I would like you to consider is that, given two equally proficient administrators, I will always prefer the one who has tried to share what he or she has learned rather than kept it to themselves.