You're falling behind in System Administration trends. How can internships help you catch up?

Internships aren't made to catch up. They're made to introduce, and to drop the toil on the new person. If you're falling behind in sysadmin trends, an internship seems like the last job you would want. They aren't generalized enough to provide much in the way of real-world skills. You may be assigned a few projects here and there, but you won't find your fingers in more than a few pies, and you'll only scratch the surface. You want a DEVOPS or SRE job, and at a smaller company, small enough that you are drawn into every line of business, every business application, every technology in play, or build that organization in your current company yourself.

There is no comprehensive book in system administration that will prepare you for real world crisis that happens daily on a real live environments. Time is limited when crisis happens and timely decision matters particularly since it may result in permanent loss of data or costly over the weekend recovery procedures. Theoretical knowledge does not give people confidence to act decisively, only actual experience will do that. So internship and exposure are important for the job. If you are just starting your career, it pays to get a job at the most challenging environment that you can find and learn from the best.

Internships at certain companies in specific industries can be very beneficial. It can provide not only real world experience but also potential experience in modern day up to date applications (rather than dated infrastructure). In todays world, AI is starting to rear itself in certain industries especially in small-medium sized organizations. That as an example is something that an internship would be beneficial towards staying up to date in system administration.

Internships are not meant for you to learn something new, they are a position to introduce a newbie to the real world. There are a ton of on-line classes & info that will help you get better faster

Networking with hiring managers and technical experts are definitely the way to climb career ladders. Referals work! Interns are seldom assigned critical work, but that is ok, repetitive but necessary tasks such as running reports provide a lot of information specially if the supervisor teaches you on how to interpret the technical data or highlight potential problems. Eventually companies with Internship programs will hire. If you create a good impression they will keep you in mind.

Cutting edge exposure - If this refers to the latest and greatest monitoring, reporting or administrative software. Yes, actual live operations will typically make use of the latest and greatest and will introduce you to skills you will not get from school. Most of the companies I have worked in have internship programs. They provide the company some means to claim social credit (giving back to the community). It is also practical to scout the people you need from your interns because you already know intangibles such as work attitude and crisis management skill. If you have opportunity - Internship is a great way to start your career.

There are many specialisations in system administration being in an actual work environment will perhaps give you clarity on the job you want to pursue: Network, Storage, DB, Security, systems, etc. Internship allows you to observe the administrators in the actual working environment and gives you a clue of what to expect.

There are hundreds of permutations of computing platforms. If you intend to work for a bank, chances are the bank will use an IBM mainframe or midrange server, and 3rd party Financial Application software packages. There is going to be interfaces with VISA MC, Amex, Cash Machines, POS machines, government . You will not get this exposure in school, you get this in the actual job site. When they actually hire you, it will just start the life long learning of the computing environment of the company who hired you. Companies can either pirate people from the competition or run internship programs to teach skills internally.