Technical IT Skills: Basic Hard Skills

In any scenario, a company is going to pay you for some skill you know that enables them to make a profit in some way (whether financial or not).  So you have to ask yourself, what will they pay me for?  In IT for a systems administration role, this will including setting up and maintaining services and networking.  These services would include file and print services, e-mail server, web server, database server and others.  More advance and complex services, and thus more earning potential,  would include security solutions, automation solutions, backup and disaster recovery solutions, and especially single-sign-on solutions.

At the community colleges around the Bay Area, there's tons of courses one can take.  They range from programming, scripting, operating systems (MS Windows, Linux), web servers (Apache), database servers (MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle), e-mail servers (MS Exchange), networking (CCNA), security, etc..  You can learn a lot from these courses, but ultimately real skill is acquired when you apply the knowledge, either at the work, or experimenting at home.

Here's some college int the area that offer IT oriented courses:

• Foothill College's CTIS Degrees: http://www.foothill.edu/ctis/degrees.php
• De Anza College's CIS Degrees: http://cis.deanza.edu/cis/degrees.html
• City College of SF's CNIT: http://www.ccsf.edu/Departments/Computer_Networking_and_Information_Technology/
• City College of SF's CS: http://www.ccsf.edu/Departments/Computer_Science/