Andy and Eric break down the actual Microsoft skills that move the needle with no fluff, and no buzzword salad. We hit the core Windows/AD fundamentals, the PowerShell magic you’ll use every day, and the cloud/M365 bits that keep modern shops sane.

If you’re trying to level up without wasting cycles, this is your roadmap.

What we cover (at a glance):

- Identity & Directory - AD/Entra basics, Group Policy that won’t bite you later, hybrid gotchas

- Automation - PowerShell patterns you’ll use forever (loops, pipeline, remoting, “please don’t run that in prod”)

- Networking for Windows admins: DNS/DHCP sanity checks, practical troubleshooting, knowing when it’s actually the firewall

- Microsoft 365 - mail flow triage, Teams/SharePoint survival skills

- Security stack - Defender realities, Conditional Access guardrails, least privilege that people will actually follow, Just in time administration.

- Azure orientation - VMs, storage, networking, Arc and what’s worth learning first

- Career path - what to learn now vs. what to park for later, and which certs are signal vs. noise

Bring coffee. Leave with a plan. And yes, a little snark, because ticket queues were meant to be mocked.

Episode Resources

- SysAdmin Weekly Companion Newsletter

- AndyOnTech

- Project Runspace

- SysAdmin Weekly - 018 - What did Broadcom do to VMware?

- SysAdmin Weekly - 014 - How SysAdmins can Showcase Value

- SysAdmin Weekly - 008 - Getting Started with GitHub Copilot