You're starting a career in System Administration. Which resources should you turn to for learning?

In my career in IT System Administration, I followed these steps: 1.Understanding the Basics: We have to start from fundamental grasp of IT systems and administration. 2.Choosing a Path ??: We have to identify our area of interest, such as networking, cloud computing, security, or endpoint management. 3.Learning ???? : Deepen our knowledge in our chosen area and we have to explore specialized topics. 4.Utilizing Resources ??: We have to use platforms like Google Cloud Platform,CISCO,Microsoft for courses and certifications to enhance and validate your skills.

As per my experience, online courses are the major resources for IT beginners. Because nowadays, there are thousands of online courses, materials, hands on labs (Paid / Non-Paid) can find from the various platforms. as a startup, you can decide your learning paths and can start to learn from scratch. during your studying, you will gain theoretical, hands on, industry-based knowledge from those courses. Also, you can join Q&A sessions, Forums, Tech Communities which related to your learning paths. You only need to focus the learning paths that related to you. Lastly, its better if you can prepare a timetable (Schedule) for your learning paths and it may be more helpful to align each subject in a proper order and avoid missing studies

I'd start by looking at some of the free courses from Professor Messer. You'll get a pretty good idea of what information technology professionals deal with on a daily basis by examining the content for the CompTIA certifications. I've found that by coupling your studies to an industry certification, you often create the necessary motivation to finish the class. Otherwise, there are plenty of good Udemy courses on topics like Linux Administration or Active Directory.

Community forums are mostly use to Q&A related things and share the new technology updates, share the knowladge and many more things. Most of IT professionals are using those forums to raise their questions and seek solutions for their problems. If anyone in this forum who knows a real solution for the perticular questions, they will provide their thoughts for it. Thats how basically tech community works. As a sys admin, you deffinitely need to join with those forums to gain industry level knowladge, get quick solutions for your problems, and wise versa

Like I mentioned above, by coupling your studies to an industry certification, you generate the motivation to further learn. Nobody wants to waste a couple hundred dollars on an exam and not pass! IT certifications range from entry level IT certifications like the CompTIA A+ to more specialized certifications like Cisco's CCNA for networking or AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate for cloud computing. If you're just starting out, I really do recommend checking out Professor Messer's free courses for CompTIA. Even if you choose not to sit for the certification, you'll get a good grasp of what daily IT operations looks like.

Besides on the job experience, the next best thing you can do is build a homelab to practice on. This could be as simple as Rasberry Pi 5 loaded up with your favorite Linux distros to practice bash and python scripts with, or it could be as extensive as a multi-node virtualization cluster running Proxmox and a number of virtualized guests. By playing with these technologies, it not only gives you the hands-on experience to demonstrate more proficiency, but you also get something to talk about during interviews. You might not have been the IT administrator at your previous job, but you can say that you've spun up your own domain controller and configured a few group policies in your homelab and understand the system well.