CCNA (and any cert) is pretty meaningless without experience. I certainly wouldn't hire someone just because they had a CCNA.

Throw 2 years of experience behind that, and you might make reasonable money starting out.

 

I got my degree in Information Systems Management from UCSC but honestly, hands on experience is what counts.

I had a few years of solid experience before college and was able to land a gig at Cisco right after graduation.

 

I'd agree with the experience argument for sure.

Experience will usually beat out a cert...

Experience and a cert will beat out the above...

A cert with no experience will get pwned by all...

but it is much better than no cert and no experience.

 

Speaking from experience. Masters degree in CS, multiple certs(CCNP, CNE, MCSE +I, MCDBA, and most recently MCSD .NET, working on CCSP now), plus experience > all. Well, that depends. Some companies have voiced concern about my salary and are afraid to pick that senior of an IT guy. Although once a company gets bit BAD from inexperienced IT folks they will hunt for those of us that can actually tell their **** from a hole int he ground.

Also in the bay area IT folks generally start out at a higher paying job than straight programming. The more areas you can sink your teeth into, the more job security you will have. I do system building(cluster servers and such), application development, SQL and Oracle, networking(firewalls and VPN are my main dig), and pretty much anything I can get my hands on, although fo some reason I've stayed away from telephony. I've had several chances to get into out phone exchange but steer clear of.

A good way to start out as a help desk tech after learning some basic troubleshooting garb like A+(which was a joke to me) then start the cert craze, prove yourself, and move up in the world. More and more companies need some serious security experts so working on things like CCSP, MCSE Security, and security + are pretty sought after(I'm looking for one to help me right now). Also data integrity is a pretty serious concern, so boning up on building and taking care of cluster servers helps too.

 

^^Thats all excellent advice. Getting your hands into as much as you can, espcially, is valuable. It at least gives you the ability to say in an interview when asked if you have experience with using, say, HP Openview Network Management (which you've never seen), you can say no, but I do have good experience with a similar open source product called Nagios as well as Big Brother.

Most decent companies dont REALLY care if a general sysadmin knows VERITAS NETBACKUP specifically, they want you to know SOME network backups system, and Legato, Arkeia, Bacula, etc. are all close enough that you could figure it out in 10 minutes. So, yes, get your hands on everything possible.

illusion mentioned clusters...clustering technology is great, but its tough to 'bone up on' without setting up/working on a real live cluster, because, to be honest, the top end clustering software is pricing. Sun Cluster, RedHat Cluster, DEC Cluster are all very expensive software. Sure, you can play with some of the ideas by doing parallel non failover cluster using some sort of load balancing, but its not quite the same as a true failover cluster.

Good places for an admin to start is at a school. Schools can't afford to pay much, so they tend to attract guys like you with not alot of experience, a willingness to work hard and a desire for really good benefits (usually). Spend 3 years in wschool to build up your skills (which will also cause you to see ALOT of different systems/interactions), then move private sector for the dough .

Sorry for the long random post. Good luck! My company doesn't have any opening right now, but feel free to PM/email me if you need any help/have specific questions.