Run the servers, accounts and backups a company lives on. Two years of college and hands-on certifications, no degree required.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $75,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $44,000 at the lower end to about $114,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
3 to 5 years after high school, on the usual route.
$1,000 to $25,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no licence to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Moderate demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$75,000
Lower end
$44,000
Upper end
$114,000
Job Bank lists this job as 'network system administrator' (NOC 22220), the same code as network administrators. Its national median is $36 an hour, about $75,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The low is $21 and the high is $55 an hour: the bottom and top of the range for everyone in the group.
$69,361 a year
Step 1 of the entry level in the federal IT (information technology) group, from December 22, 2024
The federal grid is public. The entry level rises to $89,382 at step 8, and the next level starts at $85,854. Private employers and smaller organizations set their own pay.
$54.40 an hour
The median in Nunavut, the highest in Canada
Among the provinces, Nova Scotia ($39.16) and Alberta ($38.67) lead. Ontario's median is $35.71, and British Columbia's is the lowest, at $31.25.
Roughly, all in
$1,000 to $25,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is skipping college entirely: take a help desk job, pay for two or three certification exams yourself, and practise at home on virtual machines, no-cost cloud accounts and vendor documentation. The high end is a longer or pricier college diploma plus several certification exams. The cheap door is harder because a diploma gets your application read and a help desk job does not always come with a way upward, so you have to talk your way into server work at the employer you already have and prove it before anyone gives you the title.
Most learning after college costs nothing: vendor documentation, virtual machines on your own computer, and the no-cost tiers of the big cloud platforms.
Public-sector pensions
Hospitals, universities, school boards and governments run big server fleets and offer defined-benefit pensions.
Health and dental
Standard almost everywhere.
On-call pay or time off in lieu
Someone has to answer when a server dies at night. It is usually paid.
Training budget
Vendors retire products and certifications constantly, so most employers pay to keep you current.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A college diploma, a hands-on certification, and a couple of years on a help desk. Then you own the servers.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Computer science, math and English. Install Linux on an old laptop and break things on purpose.
College diploma
2 to 3 years
Computer systems technology or a similar IT (information technology) program: 2 years for a diploma, 3 for an advanced diploma. Look for co-op.
Certify
During or right after college
One Linux certification (RHCSA, the Red Hat Certified System Administrator, is the respected one) or one Microsoft certification, depending on the shops you want to work in.
Help desk or junior administrator
1 to 2 years
Resetting passwords, building laptops, then creating user accounts and patching servers. Most people spend 1 to 2 years here.
Systems administrator
Year 3 onward
Responsible for servers, backups, identity and security patches. From here the ladder goes to senior, infrastructure lead, or cloud and DevOps (development plus operations) engineering.
Computer science
Scripting is half the job now. Python, Bash and PowerShell.
Math
Capacity planning, storage math, logic.
English
Documentation, change requests and outage reports have to be clear.
Business
Helps you understand why the finance system matters more than the intranet.
No licence, no professional college, no provincial rules. Vendor certifications from companies like Red Hat and Microsoft are the proof employers accept. Nothing ties you to a province, so moving across Canada or abroad is easy.
Ontario
Seneca's Computer Systems Technology (3 year advanced diploma), and 2 year diplomas such as Algonquin's Computer Systems Technician: Networking, Conestoga's Information Technology Infrastructure and Services, and Mohawk's Network Systems.
British Columbia
BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology) Computer Systems Technology, 2 years. It is mostly software, with a system administration course in its information systems option.
Alberta
NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology) and SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) IT (information technology) diplomas.
Quebec and the Atlantic
CEGEP (Quebec's public college system) computer science technology programs; NSCC (Nova Scotia Community College) and NBCC (New Brunswick Community College) IT programs.
In Quebec most system administrators train in a 3 year CEGEP (public college) program, which has no tuition for full-time Quebec residents.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
The Computer Science Technology program needs Secondary IV math in the Technical and Scientific or Science sequence, or Secondary V Cultural, Social and Technical math.
Computer Science Technology DEC (Diploma of College Studies, 420.B0)
3 years
2,670 hours. Choose a college with the server options: intranet, internet and database servers, plus automation and monitoring. In English at John Abbott, which teaches Linux, Windows and networking.
Or start with a DEP (Diploma of Vocational Studies) in IT Support (5385)
About 18 months
1,800 hours at a vocational centre, taught in English as 5885. It leads to support and network jobs, a common first step before server work.
First job in support
1 to 3 years
Help desk or junior administrator. Certifications work the same as in the rest of Canada.
Move up to systems administrator
Varies
Take over servers, accounts and backups as you prove yourself.
You can get the Computer Science Technology DEC (Diploma of College Studies) by having your experience assessed instead of taking classes. Champlain Saint-Lambert runs this for the network and security administration option, aimed at people already working as system or network administrators. It is online, takes 5 to 24 months for the technical part plus 12 to 24 months of general courses, and costs at most $575 for Quebec residents.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Cloud platforms
AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure administrator certifications. Most new servers are virtual machines in the cloud.
Automation
Tools like Ansible and Terraform that build servers from code instead of by hand. This is the path to DevOps (development plus operations) roles.
Virtualization
VMware or Hyper-V (the two main products for running many virtual servers on one physical machine), still the backbone of most Canadian data centres.
Security
Patching, hardening and identity management. CompTIA Security+ is a common add-on.
A home lab
A used server or a few virtual machines on a gaming PC (personal computer). Employers ask about it in interviews.
Written documentation habit
The administrator who documents is the one who gets to take vacation.
A calm phone manner
You will explain outages to angry people.
Security clearance eligibility
Federal departments and defence contractors hire a lot of administrators in the Ottawa area.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Morning: check backups ran, read overnight alerts, review the patch schedule. Then tickets: a new hire needs accounts, a shared drive is full, an application server is slow. Afternoon is project work, like migrating email to the cloud or replacing a storage array, usually tested in a lab first. Big changes wait for the evening maintenance window. The rhythm is quiet weeks broken by the occasional very bad day when something core fails and you are the person who fixes it.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Red Hat calls its RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) exam performance-based: you pass by doing real administration tasks on a Linux system, not by picking answers.
Microsoft's Azure Administrator certification lasts 12 months. You keep it by passing a free online test on Microsoft Learn each year, because the cloud product keeps changing.
System Administrator Appreciation Day falls on the last Friday of July. Friday, July 30, 2027 is the 28th one.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Security and networks first, then the rest of the field. See every career in tech.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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