A portfolio of your work is a great way to show at the job interview that you are able to produce work that the hiring manager wants. Anyone can make claims as to his skills and abilities, but producing tangible evidence of those skills makes it clear, and reduces the risk for the interviewer. Bringing a portfolio also puts you above other candidates who don't.

For programmers, code samples are the most obvious work product to bring, but what about sysadmins? Jeffery Land writes:

I was curious about what you suggest for a systems administrator to bring in a portfolio? Most of the work revolves around resource management and troubleshooting issues. At the end of the day this pretty much just leaves you with the experience and nothing you can really point to. I've been putting together a blog with my experience that I point out to potential employers but that's pretty much that best I've been able to come up with for a sample.

There's plenty you do that has a trail. I'd start with just about anything you've created that gets put on paper:

  • Network diagrams
  • Policy manuals
  • Documentation
  • Checklists
  • Project schedules
  • Training materials
  • Budgets

You can also include electronic files and code:

  • Significant shell scripts
  • Configuration files

Before you snicker at how silly a config file might be, consider the research and care and feeding that goes into it. For example, tuning PostgreSQL's memory and disk usage can be a huge challenge. My postgresql.conf files at work have been tweaked and tuned and comments explain why different settings are set as they are. Some places have links to pages that give the reasons for each parameter's value. It shows the history and reasoning behind it all.

One caution, though, is that while these documents and files are great evidence of your skills, they may well be considered confidential by your company. You certainly don't want to include any proprietary information or passwords in your portfolio. You should plan on leaving your portfolio at the interview, and don't want to say "I can only leave certain documents."

Whether or not you can get existing work products, Jeffery's blog idea is a great one. It allows him an easy way to show that he has experience and know-how, even without a final work product to show. Take a look at his blog entry called "Configuring DNS Zones in Core", where Jeffrey explains configuration details for DNS under Windows. He's created a helpful resource out on the net that will likely improve his blog's Google page rank, and anyone checking him out online can get an idea of his sysadmin skills.

Your portfolio is a powerful selling tool at the interview, and every techie can create one, no matter the type of work she does.