Keeping information systems running day to day, you administer servers, applications, databases, and the integration points between them — patching, monitoring, backups, user access, and the small fires that keep services up. The operational hand on the keyboard.
A typical week often involves patch cycles, monitoring reviews, backup verifications, and a steady drip of access requests and incidents — provisioning a new user, troubleshooting an application that's acting up, restoring a deleted file, working through a vendor change-control window. You might find yourself switching between half a dozen consoles in a single morning. Uptime, ticket closure, and security posture are the operating measures.
The harder part is often the on-call dimension — systems don't observe business hours, and the pager finds you when something breaks. Variance across employers is wide: at small organizations you're a generalist across platforms; at large enterprises you'll specialize on a specific stack (Active Directory, Linux, SQL Server, networking).
People who tend to thrive here have a troubleshooter's patience and the discipline to document fixes for the next person. Vendor certifications (Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco) anchor advancement. The trade-off is off-hours work, both scheduled and unscheduled, and the constant pressure of being the person who keeps the lights on.
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Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
Roles with similar work and overlapping career paths
View all Business Operations roles →Keeping information systems running day to day, you administer servers, applications, databases, and the integration points between them — patching, monitoring, backups, user access, and the small fires that keep services up. The operational hand on the keyboard.
Median pay for an Information Systems Administrator is about $134K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $60K to $208K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Critical Thinking, Reading Comprehension, Active Listening, Monitoring, and Judgment and Decision Making.
Most people in this role hold a bachelor's degree.
Employment in this field is projected to grow about 5.5% through 2034, with roughly 964,540 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Computer Systems Information Director, Information Systems Director (IS Director), and Information Director.
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Get your career on record. Then decide.