Should I pursue RHCE after five years as a sysadmin, or focus on automation?

[Paul_T]

I’ve been working as a sysadmin for five years and I’m trying to figure out if getting a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) is the right next step for me. My job is starting to involve more automation and scripting, and I’m not sure if my current hands-on knowledge is enough to reliably handle that shift.

[Donald81]

RHCE could be a good next step if you want to signal you can scale hands on skills into a formal automation mindset. For me it nudged me to standardize configs, write repeatable scripts, and think about security baked in from day one. It isn’t a magic wand, though—the real payoff comes from turning ad hoc fixes into documented patterns your team can reuse.

[Stella69]

I started with small projects, wrote a few scripts to automate backups and routine checks, and kept a rough time log. After two months I saw about a 25% reduction in weekly manual tasks, but I still felt gaps in error handling and observability.

[Addison_M]

Is the real issue the lack of a cert or the lack of time to ship real automation in prod? I sometimes wonder if the bottleneck is governance, ticket queues, or patch windows rather than skill gaps.

[EricFJ]

Try a 60-day pilot: automate one repeatable task end-to-end in a sandbox, add basic monitoring, and track time saved and failure rate. If you get two good iterations, you may have momentum.