G'day Guys,
I am a sysadmin (Officially "Computer Systems Manager")posting from my office at a school, in Adelaide, South Australia.
Moved here in 1970 at 10years old, and I love it. NOTHING would tempt me to move back to the UK permanantely!
Work in schools here is relatively easy to get, anyone with good experience will find work. I have no official IT qualifications, apart from 30 years as a comms tech, self taught in IT.
Problem is getting enough hours for new entrants. I work across 2 schools 14hrs PW at each (.7 total), and after 3 years finally got a deal including paid holidays, only becuase the schools I work for could not replace me with anyone near as competent. Most of my colleagues only work 40 weeks per year, when students are actually at school, and get no pay in the holidays.(They get a 16% pay loading to compensate)
I have a disability, so cannot work full time, if I could I would earn almost TWICE the ammount I do in schools (45k/year full Time in school) in private industry.
Largely, only folks starting their careers, or those who cannot work full time seem to school be IT persons here. That said if you are any good
you will not have a lot to do, I laughed at the guy who posted that they are busy all the time at school, bot is he doing something wrong.
I have about 4 weeks per year when its busy(The start of the year and when new machines arrive), mainly as a result of very strong user discipline, and solid fully locked down, high quality systems I selected, puchased and setup .
No one gets the admin password, especially not teachers! No one but me is allowed to install software. This was my precondition before starting the job. I like to be thought of as the IT ogre by students and staff(-: (though that pesky librarian keeps telling people I am a nice guy just crusty on the outside, damn her it took ages to build that ogre image up). The students know how grumpy I am and rarely step out of line and get my attention. It works GREAT.
The rest of the year I hide away in my office, and post to websites like this!
Breakdown rate is negligible, about 1 fault per week over 200 PC's, if that.
I would be intersted to know how many Comps per person you are expected to maintain in the UK.
As I told my trainee recently, if you deliver top quality results no one will care what you do the rest of the time.
My bosses are well aware of all this, but they know what it was like before I came in and re did everything, costs have fallen and reliability is as good as you get.
Hope you find this somewhat helpful
Dave
