Here's how you can prioritize technical skills for beginners in System Administration.

1. Setting Goal provides a clarity on what is expected, out of an individual. First step of stair should be setting suitable goals 2. Decision making should be the second step, as it enables an individual to think through and come up with an appropriate solution. 3. Continuous support and interaction will help an individual to guide on the right path with a view of enhancing, developing and motivating. 4. A leader always focuses on developing accountability which in turn bring about a sense of responsibility. 5. Collaboration and Communication is next, as it helps an individual, to interact and know partners and work efficiently as a team. 6. There is always a room for growth in life and work. It helps to adapt to various conditions.

A lot of the fundamentals are covered in computer science classes, but without those it makes sense to understand the OSI layers and how they relate. A really great book on this is It Mastery - Networking for Systems Administrators by Michael Lucas. At the very least understand which tools work at which layer (L2, L3, L4 and L7 are the most used ones) L2: Understand how ARP works, Mac addresses, VLAN's L3: Understand IP's, routing L4: Understand TCP / UDP, NAT L7: Depends on the application, but half the web is HTTP(S) so curl Don't be afraid to setup a few VM's on your computer and network them to test things out

Yes, 100% Get to grips with basic network fault-finding. then add in some knowledge of models & protocols. and other services like DNS / DHCP / ...

A good way to increase proficiency is to read the docs, manpages and go out and build stuff with it. While this article mentions Linux proficiency, it's definitely helpful to try one of the BSD's for more perspective and great documentation that will help deepen your understanding. Every distribution has their own way of dealing with packages: Yum for EL based systems, Apt for Debian and Ubuntu. Some familiarity with both is fine, but unless you are building your own packages you should really focus on the core tools. Nowadays computers are so powerful that you can have a small lab on your laptop with multiple machines to try out

I'm actually going to say, know what systems you need to support. There is absolutely no need to be proficient in Linux if you know you only have to deal with Windows boxes. However; you will want to have some knowledge of Linux / Unix for completeness

Scripting is a minefield that must be traversed. Do you need knowledge of old-school DOS Batch or more recent PowerShell? If Linux then it'll be Bash or similar. Do you need more complex scripting using Python, JavaScript or some other language?

Yes, you will need to have knowledge of Virtualization. Again, know your environment; what hypervisor are you going to meet? Hyper-V, ZenOS, VMware, ...

Since most organizations use both on premise and cloud based solutions to be able to provide customers the highest standard of service,it is necessary modern system administrators learn various offerings the cloud provides to be able to know which solutions to deploy to better address business needs