System administrator
| Highest | $3,500 / mo · United States |
|---|---|
| Experience | 0–1 yrs |
| Degree | Required |
| First paycheck | 3 to 4 years of university study |
Pay in the destination countries
Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.
| Country | Monthly |
|---|---|
| United StatesTOEFL 80–100 · $10–70k | $3,500max |
| SwitzerlandIELTS 6.5 · CHF 0.9–8k | $3,350 |
| NorwayIELTS 6.0–6.5 · NOK 130–260k | $3,350 |
| SwedenIELTS 6.5 · SEK 90–295k | $3,350 |
| DenmarkIELTS 6.5 · DKK 45–135k | $3,350 |
| NetherlandsIELTS 6.0–6.5 · €8–20k | $3,350 |
What does the day look like?
A standard working week spans 40 hours. In enterprise data centers, internet providers, and managed service providers, work involves rotating shifts (morning, evening, night) and on-call duties carrying an emergency phone 1 week per month. Routine maintenance, provisioning, and identity management take 65% of the day using Microsoft Active Directory, Entra ID, LDAP, GPO, SSO, and hypervisors like VMware vSphere, Proxmox VE, and Hyper-V. Another 20% of the day goes to backups and storage monitoring with Veeam, BorgBackup, Bacula, Zabbix, Grafana, and Prometheus.
Tactical security operations account for only 15% of the day: patching operating systems (Ubuntu Server, Debian, RHEL, Windows Server), enforcing MFA, auditing Syslog records, configuring host firewalls (UFW, firewalld, iptables), and deploying EDR agents. While newcomers often imagine spending 80% to 90% of their time actively stopping hackers or writing exploits, 85% of an entry-level administrator's actual workload consists of everyday systems engineering like rotating certificates, troubleshooting crashed services, and resolving storage tickets.
Where does this lead?
Next step up
What do you make of this job?