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Full Discussion: Career Change
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Career Change Post 8096 by PxT on Friday 5th of October 2001 01:15:21 PM
Old 10-05-2001
First the bad news: After 12 years as an engineer, you were probably making a pretty decent salary. Since you have limited Unix experience, you might only be able to find an entry level position, so you would probably end up taking a pay cut.

Since you are asking this question I assume you are willing to live with that. The good news is that you do not have to be certified to land a decent Unix job. Of course many employers will be happy if you are certified, but I have yet to find any that require it. Certification has been discussed several times here in the past, and the general consensus has been that certification is only one step in the career process, with experience generally being a much more important factor to your overall marketability.

If you are serious about this career path, I would suggest learning all you can. Check the forums for some good book recommendations. Install some version of Unix on a spare home machine if you haven't already. Try to become familiar with some of the details of the system. Many community colleges offer classes in Unix Basics and/or System Administration -- they are often a good inexpensive way to get some hands-on exposure.

It sounds as though your knowledge of computers in general is reasonably high -- I would guess that you could step into a Junior Sys Admin position pretty easily if you spend the time to learn some of the basics, and the company is willing to offer you some training. Maybe try to leverage your strengths by looking for a job in which you would be supporting systems for an engineering firm/department.


Just my 2 cents...

Good luck
 

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CAL(1)								   User Commands							    CAL(1)

NAME
cal - display a calendar SYNOPSIS
cal [options] [[[day] month] year] DESCRIPTION
cal displays a simple calendar. If no arguments are specified, the current month is displayed. OPTIONS
-1, --one Display single month output. (This is the default.) -3, --three Display prev/current/next month output. -s, --sunday Display Sunday as the first day of the week. -m, --monday Display Monday as the first day of the week. -j, --julian Display Julian dates (days one-based, numbered from January 1). -y, --year Display a calendar for the current year. -V, --version Display version information and exit. -h, --help Display help screen and exit. PARAMETERS
A single parameter specifies the year (1 - 9999) to be displayed; note the year must be fully specified: cal 89 will not display a calendar for 1989. Two parameters denote the month (1 - 12) and year. Three parameters denote the day (1-31), month and year, and the day will be highlighted if the calendar is displayed on a terminal. If no parameters are specified, the current month's calendar is displayed. A year starts on Jan 1. The first day of the week is determined by the locale. The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in 1752 on the 3rd of September. By this time, most countries had recognized the ref- ormation (although a few did not recognize it until the early 1900's). Ten days following that date were eliminated by the reformation, so the calendar for that month is a bit unusual. HISTORY
A cal command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. AVAILABILITY
The cal command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/. util-linux June 2011 CAL(1)
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