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Entry Level Network Administrator Jobs in Virginia

Responsibilities Peraton is seeking an entry level Systems Administrator (Shift 2) to join our ... Maintain network diagrams and circuit records, maintain trouble logs, and instruct users in the use ...

Responsibilities Peraton is seeking an entry level Systems Administrator (Shift 2) to join our ... Maintain network diagrams and circuit records, maintain trouble logs, and instruct users in the use ...

... is an entry-level role ideal for someone early in their IT career who is passionate about ... Familiarity with networking, Network + certification What we can offer you: * Generous PTO and ...

New

... is an entry-level role ideal for someone early in their IT career who is passionate about ... Familiarity with networking, Network + certification What we can offer you: * Generous PTO and ...

New

... is an entry-level role ideal for someone early in their IT career who is passionate about ... Familiarity with networking, Network + certification What we can offer you: * Generous PTO and ...

... is an entry-level role ideal for someone early in their IT career who is passionate about ... Familiarity with networking, Network + certification What we can offer you: * Generous PTO and ...

... is an entry-level role ideal for someone early in their IT career who is passionate about ... Familiarity with networking, Network + certification What we can offer you: * Generous PTO and ...

This is an entry-level position allowing the TPA the ability to work independently and coordinate ... Administer and maintain database for Emergency Voucher Assistance program * Assist with all ...

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Showing results 1-20

Entry Level Network Administrator information

See Virginia salary details

$33.2K

$81K

$122.9K

How much do entry level network administrator jobs pay per year?

As of Jul 27, 2026, the average yearly pay for entry level network administrator in Virginia is $81,048.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $64,900.00 and $92,700.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What qualifications do I need to be a network administrator?

Entry-level network administrators typically need a high school diploma or equivalent, with many employers preferring an associate's or bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field. Relevant certifications such as CompTIA Network+ or Cisco CCNA can enhance job prospects, and strong problem-solving skills along with knowledge of networking protocols and operating systems are essential.

What are some typical challenges faced by entry level network administrators during their first year on the job?

Entry level network administrators often encounter challenges such as troubleshooting unfamiliar network issues, adapting to organization-specific protocols, and balancing multiple support requests simultaneously. Learning to efficiently document changes and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical staff is also crucial. With time, gaining confidence in using network monitoring tools and responding to security alerts becomes easier, and many organizations provide mentorship or structured training to help new administrators succeed.

What Does an Entry-Level Network Administrator Do?

As an entry-level network administrator, your job is to learn how to install, maintain, troubleshoot, and repair a network system. To accomplish this, you may purchase and replace hardware, train with the company's existing software, and provide service to either customers or coworkers. As an entry-level employee, your primary job is learning about your company's systems, which may frequently involve watching other administrators and providing minor support to a customer. Most companies use this position as a training role with the intention of promoting you to a full network administrator after you meet their criteria. Entry-level network administrators often use software to monitor network performance and analyze traffic.

How to become a network administrator with no experience?

To become an entry-level network administrator with no experience, focus on gaining foundational knowledge of networking concepts, protocols, and hardware through online courses or self-study. Earning certifications such as CompTIA Network+ or Cisco CCNA can demonstrate your skills to employers, and gaining hands-on experience through labs, internships, or volunteering can improve your prospects.

Can I become a sysadmin without a degree?

Entry level network administrators can often enter the field without a degree by gaining relevant certifications such as CompTIA Network+ or Cisco CCNA, and developing practical skills through hands-on experience. Employers may prioritize skills, certifications, and experience over formal education for these roles.

What does an Entry Level Network Administrator do?

An Entry Level Network Administrator is responsible for supporting and maintaining an organization’s computer networks. Their tasks typically include monitoring network performance, troubleshooting connectivity issues, setting up network hardware, and assisting with network security measures. They work under the supervision of more experienced IT staff to ensure reliable and efficient network operations. This role is a great starting point for those looking to build a career in network administration or IT.

What is the difference between Entry Level Network Administrator vs Network Technician?

AspectEntry Level Network AdministratorNetwork Technician
CertificationsCompTIA Network+, Cisco CCNA (optional)CompTIA Network+, Cisco CCNA (optional)
Work EnvironmentNetwork management, configuration, troubleshooting, and monitoringHardware setup, cabling, on-site troubleshooting
Employer & Industry UsageIT departments, service providers, corporate networksTelecom companies, ISPs, enterprise networks

Both roles often require similar certifications like CompTIA Network+ and Cisco CCNA. While a Network Technician focuses more on hardware and physical network setup, an Entry Level Network Administrator handles network configuration, management, and troubleshooting. The roles are complementary, with the administrator overseeing network health and the technician implementing physical infrastructure.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as an Entry Level Network Administrator, and why are they important?

To thrive as an Entry Level Network Administrator, you need a fundamental understanding of networking concepts, TCP/IP protocols, and at least an associate degree or relevant certification such as CompTIA Network+. Familiarity with network management tools, basic command-line utilities, and operating systems like Windows and Linux is typically required. Strong problem-solving abilities, attention to detail, and effective communication skills help you diagnose and resolve network issues efficiently. These skills ensure reliable network operations and support the organization's IT infrastructure needs.

Is network administrator an entry-level role?

A network administrator role can be entry-level, especially for those with basic knowledge of networking concepts, operating systems, and certifications like CompTIA Network+. However, many positions require some prior experience or technical skills, and advanced roles often demand additional certifications or experience. Entry-level positions typically involve supporting existing networks and learning on the job.
What are the most commonly searched types of Network Administrator jobs in Virginia? The most popular types of Network Administrator jobs in Virginia are:
What are popular job titles related to Entry Level Network Administrator jobs in Virginia? For Entry Level Network Administrator jobs in Virginia, the most frequently searched job titles are:
What job categories do people searching Entry Level Network Administrator jobs in Virginia look for? The top searched job categories for Entry Level Network Administrator jobs in Virginia are:
What cities in Virginia are hiring for Entry Level Network Administrator jobs? Cities in Virginia with the most Entry Level Network Administrator job openings:
Infographic showing various Entry Level Network Administrator job openings in Virginia as of July 2026, with employment types broken down into 1% As Needed, 83% Full Time, 12% Part Time, 1% Temporary, and 3% Contract. Highlights an 94% Physical, 2% Hybrid, and 4% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $81,048 per year, or $39 per hour.
Storage Administrator (Entry Level to SME) TS/SCI with Poly REQUIRED

Storage Administrator (Entry Level to SME) TS/SCI with Poly REQUIRED

CGI Inc.

Arlington, VA • On-site

Full-time

Retirement, PTO

Posted 4 days ago


CGI rating

7.1

Company rating: 7.1 out of 10

Based on 19 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

152nd of 230 rated it services


Job description

Storage Administrator (Entry Level to SME) TS/SCI with Poly REQUIRED
Category: Database Administration
Main location: United States, Virginia, Arlington
Position ID:J0726-2000
Employment Type: Full Time
Position Description:
CGI Federal has an exciting opportunity for Storage Administrators within our Intel sector advancing the national security mission through cutting edge technology. You must have a passion for keeping pace with rapidly evolving technology advancements and leveraging your knowledge on a highly collaborative team to deliver state-of-the-art capabilities.
The Storage Administrator assists with monitoring data storage systems, running routine backups, and resolving basic space allocation tasks under the supervision of senior IT staff. The role serves as an entry-level position focused on building foundational data infrastructure skills.
CGI Federal is growing its high-performance team whose members share a passion for building high-quality, scalable, advanced IT solutions in a collaborative, fast-paced, outcome-driven mission.
This position is located in our Arlington office; however, a hybrid working model is acceptable.
Your future duties and responsibilities:
Key Responsibilities (Entry Level)
• Backup Monitoring: Track scheduled daily and weekly backup jobs across servers to ensure enterprise data is protected.
• Basic Provisioning: Execute simple tasks to allocate disk space or file shares to end-users and servers as requested.
• System Monitoring: Check storage hardware health, network switches, and available storage capacity using standard management tools.
• Issue Triage: Create support tickets and escalate complex connectivity or hardware failures to senior administrators.
• Documentation: Maintain and update basic IT diagrams, network topologies, and routine operating procedures.
Key Responsibilities (Junior Level)
• Storage Provisioning: Allocate and map LUNs or shared drives to servers and virtual machines based on predefined requirements.
• Backup & Recovery: Execute and monitor routine data backups, verify the success of backup jobs, and perform basic file or system restorations.
• Performance & Capacity Monitoring: Run reports on disk usage, track data growth trends, and reclaim unused or abandoned storage capacity.
• Hardware & Software Maintenance: Perform routine health checks, apply firmware updates, and help manage hardware lifecycles.
• Tier 1 Troubleshooting: Act as the first point of contact for storage-related incidents, such as latency issues, path failures, or access problems.
• Documentation: Maintain and update network diagrams, operational procedures, and technical documentation.
Key Responsibilities (Mid-Level)
• Enterprise Storage Management: Provision and manage block and file storage across multi-vendor environments (e.g., Pure Storage, Dell, NetApp, IBM).
• Incident Resolution: Troubleshoot complex, escalated storage issues, bottlenecks, and fabric/switch (Fiber Channel) connectivity problems.
• Performance Tuning & Monitoring: Utilize monitoring tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, vendor-specific consoles) to track latency, IOPS, and proactively identify bottlenecks.
• Data Protection & Recovery: Execute and verify snapshot schedules, replication policies, and backup/restore operations to ensure strict recovery point and time objectives.
• Lifecycle Management: Plan capacity, reclaim unused storage, and assist in non-disruptive firmware updates and hardware expansions.
• Automation: Write and maintain scripts (e.g., Python, Bash, PowerShell) to automate routine provisioning and capacity reporting.
Key Responsibilities (Senior Level)
Architecture & Engineering
• Design, build, and scale highly resilient enterprise SAN, NAS, and distributed object storage infrastructures across hybrid on-premise and multi-cloud environments.
• Formulate long-term storage capacity planning and lifecycle management strategies tied to business continuity and global data growth.
• Evaluate and integrate bleeding-edge software-defined storage (SDS) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) architectures to eliminate performance bottlenecks.
Operations & Advanced Troubleshooting
• Spearhead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and resolve Tier 3/escalated incidents related to multi-vendor storage arrays, high-performance computing (HPC) parallel file systems, and Fiber Channel (FC) interconnection fabrics.
• Perform extreme-level storage and IOPS performance tuning to optimize database and virtual machine storage network traffic.
• Administer, zone, and configure complex SAN topologies (e.g., Brocade/Cisco MDS) and enterprise NAS systems (e.g., Pure Storage, NetApp DataONTAP).
Data Protection, DR & Automation
• Architect and test multi-site disaster recovery (DR) architectures, focusing on synchronous/asynchronous replication, malware-resilient immutable snapshots, and synthetic backup pipelines (e.g., Rubrik, Commvault).
• Create infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions and automation scripts (via Python, Ansible, or Terraform) for routine provisioning, auditing, and reporting.
• Enforce strict Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and data security/governance policies to meet regulatory requirements.
Key Responsibilities (SME Level)
• Architectural Design & Engineering: Design multi-petabyte unified storage architectures (SAN, NAS, Object, and NVMe-oF) that balance cost, capacity, and IOPS to meet strict enterprise service-level agreements.
• Automation & Orchestration: Engineer Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines utilizing APIs, Python, and REST to automate LUN provisioning, zoning, and capacity tiering.
• Resiliency & Data Protection: Design continuous replication strategies, active-active datacenter mirroring (e.g., SRDF/Metro), and immutable, air-gapped backup vaulting for comprehensive ransomware mitigation.
• Performance Tuning & Analytics: Perform deep-packet and protocol-level (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB) troubleshooting to eliminate I/O bottlenecks in hyper-converged and highly virtualized host environments.
• Lifecycle Management & Capacity Planning: Direct predictive analytics and capacity modeling to drive hardware refresh cycles, cloud tiering, and data lifecycle management.
• Compliance & Security: Enforce Zero Trust security postures by implementing storage-level encryption at rest/in-flight, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and STIGs across classified and unclassified domains.
Required qualifications to be successful in this role:
All roles require an active TS/SCI with Poly
Entry Level:
• Education:
o High School Diploma/GED with 4 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 2 years of relevant experience,
o or Bachelor's Degree with 0 years of relevant experience
• Technical Knowledge: Basic understanding of networking, operating systems (Linux/Windows), and virtual environments (VMware).
• Soft Skills: Strong attention to detail, eagerness to learn enterprise storage concepts, and good communication skills for collaborating with other IT teams.
Junior Level:
• Education:
o High School Diploma/GED with 6 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 4 years of relevant experience,
o Bachelor's Degree with 2 years of relevant experience,
o or Masters Degree with 0 years of relevant experience
• Technical Knowledge: Basic understanding of Storage Area Networks (SAN), Network-Attached Storage (NAS), and RAID configurations.
• Collaboration: Ability to work alongside systems administrators, database administrators, and network engineers to resolve infrastructure incidents.
Mid-Level:
• Education:
o High School Diploma/GED with 8 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 6 years of relevant experience,
o Bachelor's Degree with 4 years of relevant experience,
o or Masters Degree with 2 years of relevant experience,
o or PhD with 0 years of relevant experience
• Storage Protocols: Deep understanding of SAN (FC, iSCSI) and NAS (NFS, SMB) protocols.
• Operating Systems: Solid foundational knowledge of Linux, Windows Server, and hypervisors (e.g., VMware vSphere) to effectively troubleshoot storage mounting and connectivity.
• Backup Solutions: Familiarity with enterprise backup architectures (e.g., Veeam, Commvault, or Avamar).
• Scripting: Basic to intermediate proficiency in Python, Bash, or PowerShell
Senior Level:
• Education:
o High School Diploma/GED with 10 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 8 years of relevant experience,
o Bachelor's Degree with 6 years of relevant experience,
o or Masters Degree with 4 years of relevant experience,
o or PhD with 2 years of relevant experience
• Deep Domain Knowledge: Exceptional troubleshooting capability within complex multi-vendor ecosystems (e.g., EMC, IBM, NetApp, Pure Storage).
• Certifications: Industry-standard architect-level credentials are highly preferred (e.g., NetApp Certified Data Administrator/Architect, EMCIE, SNIA Certified Storage Architect)
SME Level:
• Education:
o High School Diploma/GED with 12 years of relevant experience,
o Associates Degree with 10 years of relevant experience,
o Bachelor's Degree with 8 years of relevant experience,
o or Masters Degree with 6 years of relevant experience,
o or PhD with 4 years of relevant experience
• Domain Expertise: Deep hands-on proficiency with tier-1 arrays (e.g., Pure Storage, Dell PowerMax/Unity, NetApp ONTAP, IBM FlashSystem) and data protection platforms (e.g., Rubrik, Commvault, Veeam).
• Protocol & Fabrics: Mastery of Fibre Channel (FC) SAN fabric routing, NVMe, and enterprise NAS protocols.
• Cloud & Virtualization: Exceptional understanding of storage integration with VMware vSphere, Kubernetes persistent volumes, and native cloud storage services.
CGI is required by law in some jurisdictions to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role. The determination of this range includes various factors not limited to skill set, level, experience, relevant training, and licensure and certifications. To support the ability to reward for merit-based performance, CGI typically does not hire individuals at or near the top of the range for their role. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range for this role in the U.S. is $89,600.00 - $204,000.00.
CGI Federal's benefits are offered to eligible professionals on their first day of employment to include:
. Competitive compensation
. Comprehensive insurance options
. Matching contributions through the 401(k) plan and the share purchase plan
. Paid time off for vacation, holidays, and sick time
. Paid parental leave
. Learning opportunities and tuition assistance
. Wellness and Well-being programs
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What you can expect from us:
Together, as owners, let's turn meaningful insights into action.
Life at CGI is rooted in ownership, teamwork, respect and belonging. Here, you'll reach your full potential because...
You are invited to be an owner from day 1 as we work together to bring our Dream to life. That's why we call ourselves CGI Partners rather than employees. We benefit from our collective success and actively shape our company's strategy and direction.
Your work creates value. You'll develop innovative solutions and build relationships with teammates and clients while accessing global capabilities to scale your ideas, embrace new opportunities, and benefit from expansive industry and technology expertise.
You'll shape your career by joining a company built to grow and last. You'll be supported by leaders who care about your health and well-being and provide you with opportunities to deepen your skills and broaden your horizons.
Come join our team-one of the largest IT and business consulting services firms in the world.
Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their race, ethnicity, ancestry, color, sex, religion, creed, age, national origin, citizenship status, disability, pregnancy, medical condition, military and veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and gender expression, familial status or responsibilities, reproductive health decisions, political affiliation, genetic information, height, weight, or any other legally protected status or characteristics to the extent required by applicable federal, state, and/or local laws where we do business.
CGI provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. If you need an accommodation to apply for a job in the U.S., please email the CGI U.S. Employment Compliance mailbox at US_Employment_Compliance@cgi.com. You will need to reference the Position ID of the position in which you are interested. Your message will be routed to the appropriate recruiter who will assist you. Please note, this email address is only to be used for those individuals who need an accommodation to apply for a job. Emails for any other reason or those that do not include a Position ID will not be returned.
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All CGI offers of employment in the U.S. are contingent upon the ability to successfully complete a background investigation. Background investigation components can vary dependent upon specific assignment and/or level of US government security clearance held. Dependent upon role and/or federal government security clearance requirements, and in accordance with applicable laws, some background investigations may include a credit check. CGI will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrests and conviction records in accordance with all local regulations and ordinances.
CGI will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed

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