Hypothetical Question

When can I expect to make ~60k?

Right now as entry level helpdesk at my company I make around 36k. By the time the year is up, I hope to have earned my MCSA.

With it being my first year, I've really taken on a lot, helped implement ghost for some of our new systems, assisting in an exchange server conversion, after that is finished I will be assisting on moving our NT based domain over to a 2k3 domain.

We have a real small IT department for a global company, but we only deal with our US offices. Our Sr Admin might be leaving by years end opening up even more room for movement.

I know this is a weighty question... because I'm not expecting some super human raise or anything... But, given at the year end at my review, with my new certs... what would be a decent raise to ask for? Also, I know sometimes for vertical movement, sometimes you need to move around. How many years of IT are really needed before I can start to hope for a 60kish salary? I'm asking this mainly because the wife and I are thinking about having a 3rd (first child) and want to get out of our small apartment.

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Comments

BigTone

FYI the cert road I'm looking to go down is

MCSA - > CCNA and then from there we'll see which angle I really enjoy the most.

JdotQ

It depends on several factors -- a few may be;

Do you live in/near a large metropolitan area?
How big of an environment are you supporting?
How many years experience do you have?

As for decent raises to ask for...check out sites like salary.com and narrow down your job responsibilities and area of living, that will give you a decent ballpark of what type of $ is the going rate.

sprkymrk

What is a third-first child?

:

You will make 60K in aproximately 19 and a half months.

BigTone

Thanks for the replies...

I should have known to put the questions everyone always asks.

I'm in a suburb of chicago for a global logistics company supporting 20+ remote offices with about 400some users overall.

what is a third-first child?

First child, as in adding a 3rd to our family.

[/quote]

blargoe

I didn't start sniffing that kind of money until 5 years into it with 3 of dedicated sysadmin experience. But I'm in a smaller market than you.

I would say you would need a certain number of years beyond the help desk. 3-4? It's hard for me to say.

Paul Boz

It depends on where you work, how valuable you are, how successful the company is, and what you know. What sort of help desk support do you provide right now?

sprkymrk

I think if you are in a Chicago suburb, and assuming you are assisting with sysadmin responsibilities on a regular basis vs. "once in a while", and that you have an MCSA/E and are reasonably intelligent... You may have to change jobs though, depending on whether there is room for advancement in your current work place.

Based on your current slary of $36k, if you were to receive nice raises of say 10% per year, in 5 years you would be making about $58k. That's assuming they can continue to give you that kind of money every year to continue doing help desk. So it would take a promotion to a higher pay scale or moving to a new company to get the bump to 60k+ in anything less than 5-6 years.

BigTone

It depends on where you work, how valuable you are, how successful the company is, and what you know. What sort of help desk support do you provide right now?

I pretty much do it all. For our company our IT department is pretty small. We've got a security guy that used to be help desk and he's moved up now. But he helps me a lot if I come across any wierd issues, etc. A system admin, who is pretty much on the way out, once his house sells he's moving out of the country, and an "email administrator", we won't go into that though, I'm pretty much doing those duties too.

I got our manager to get ghost, so I've set up ghost images, reimaged computers,
do a bunch of reformats,
hardware installation
data extraction of old employees
phone support w/ remote connection to troubleshoot email issues,
create/disable new/old users
remote connecting to servers to troubleshoot various issues
probably some other stuff I can't think of because I'm not through my first cup of coffee yet.

One of our software guys said they used to be good about raises but for the last couple years they were only doing 2%. My hope that is with some more certs, and then if our admin leaves, maybe they'll shift the dept around a little and give out a better raise, and maybe add a helpdeks guy instead of a new sysadmin. I'm not in a rush to leave this company at all because I think I'm pretty fortunate to have stumbled on this job with only an A+/Net+ cert and getting the exposure that I'm getting. plus I don't want to sound greedy or anything saying when will I get $$$ because its really not about the money... Part of it is but for the last 3 months I've been working here I've been so much happier than my previous job (which was non IT related)