New career in HP-UX

[Felipe Rodriguez_1]

Hello,

I'm an AS/400 Sys Admin and am looking to move to Unix because of the demand factor.

I have access to an old system at work with 11i and I've been practicing for a couple of months. Just ordered the book by Rafeeq (Sp?) and will be practicing with it and looking to get certified.
I have a bit of experience, but nothing signifficant.

How should I approach a potential employer?

I obviously don't want to lie or exagerate my abilities, but I'm confident that I can perform well.

Provided I get certified, is this a realistic goal?

[Peter Godron]

Felipe,
the idea of certification is to provide proof of a standard reached. So if you become certified a potential employer will be able to see that you have reached that standard. Some employers place emphasis on experience others on certification, so you should have a good chance, given you Sys. Admin. background.
You can also always rely on the support provided through the forums!
Good Luck.

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi,

To get started and being recognized by Industry, you have to get a certification in Unix either from HP or from Redhat. Both of these certificates have good market values. It just diffrentiate your resume from others.

Try to do something imaginative, something like a shell script to automate daily admin tasks, backup, etc..

-Arun

[HGN]

Hi

This forum is a great place to start for HPUX, there are a lot of documents which can be searched. As fas as RedHat or Solaris there are also forums where you can check.
There are also good books for certification

Some links in this forum
HP
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=517455
Linux
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=992213

Rgds

HGN

[Geoff Wild]

Sure it is realistic.

Approach? Tell them about your AS/400 experience and that now you want to change gears a bit to HP-UX.

Certification will help - as it will show your commitment...

Keep working on your practise system - do things like mirroing, re-install from scratch, Ignite...

Rgds...Geoff

PS: Welcome to HP-UX!

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

A lot of places use Linux and HP-UX.

I'd recommend getting practice and if possible practical experience on both platforms. The hardware requirements are minimal in both cases.

If you can work on machines where you are, then you can say you have actual experience.

If experience is low, you can practice hard at home and take and pass the ceritification exams.

Though experience far outweighs Certification, having cerification can make up to some degree for experience gaps.

In your situation, highlight what experience you have with your practice systems. Be prepared to take a less money than a guy like
A. Clay Stephenson would demand in order to get real employment experience on platform.

SEP

[Jeff_Traigle]

A lot depends on the job market at the time you're looking. Things are somewhat better now than they were a few years ago, but they are still challenging. I earned my CSA in 2001, but spent 2 years trying to find another position. Despite the certification and nearly 10 years of UNIX experience, it was an employer's market and, since I wasn't doing HP-UX anywhere close to 100% of the time, they wouldn't even talk to me more times than not.

After finally breaking that cycle, the next challenge was overcoming the Serviceguard experience requirement so many employers using HP-UX have these days. I managed to find an employer who was using it, but wasn't looking at it as a critical skill for the temporary assignment so I was able to get a little exposure there and then took the Serviceguard class on my own to get a much better understanding of it. That paid off in a couple of weeks of the class in the form of a permanent job offer elsewhere.

So, it can be done as long as you're persistent and ambitious enough to keep pursuing it.