An organization's network, the switches, routers, and connections everything runs on, is yours to keep healthy, secure, and fast. Keeping the network that everything else depends on alive.
Days mix monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting: configuring network gear, watching performance, applying updates, and diagnosing problems when connectivity drops. When the network's down, everyone notices fast, so the craft is in keeping it stable and fixing it quickly when it isn't — you'll work behind the scenes, often with on-call duty, since networks don't keep business hours.
The role's shape depends on scale. At a small org, you may own the whole network alone; at a large one, a slice of a bigger team. On-call and off-hours work come with uptime expectations, the technology keeps evolving toward cloud and automation, and outages put you under real pressure. Much of the work is invisible until something breaks.
Folks who do well here tend to be methodical, calm under pressure, and reliability-minded — who'd rather prevent an outage than scramble through one. If you want creative work or strict nine-to-five hours, the on-call reality may not suit. But for those who take pride in keeping critical infrastructure running smoothly, the work tends to be steady and valued, even when unseen.
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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 Technology roles →An organization's network, the switches, routers, and connections everything runs on, is yours to keep healthy, secure, and fast. Keeping the network that everything else depends on alive.
Median pay for a Networking Administrator is about $97K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $60K to $150K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Critical Thinking, Reading Comprehension, Judgment and Decision Making, Systems Analysis, and Systems Evaluation.
Most people in this role hold a bachelor's degree.
Employment in this field is projected to decline about 4.2% through 2034, with roughly 318,570 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Information Technology Administrator (IT Administrator), Information Systems Operator, and Systems Tester Administrator.
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