Soft skills that make the difference
I’m a strong communicator: not afraid of a conversation, and I can argue my point constructively
with customers, managers and leadership.
I practiced these soft skills at Pets&Co (years of shop-floor customer contact),
at AlfaByte (guiding customers from intake to invoice) and at
PinkRoccade (helping TSS customers with OS and application management).
- Customer-focused and clear: translate tech into plain language
- Strong communicator: open dialogue and back up opinions clearly
- Independent and collaborative: own outcomes, bring teammates along
- End-to-end ownership: clarify needs, deliver, close the loop
- Grit: Aventus diploma to RHCSA and continuous growth in the homelab
Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) V9.3
RHCSA is not a multiple-choice quiz. It is a performance-based exam (EX200)
where you administer, configure and recover live systems. For recruiters that means:
demonstrable Linux skills that survive production, not just theory on paper.
I deliberately chose V9.3 over V10. V10 puts more emphasis on Flatpak
(similar to Ubuntu snaps). V9.3 included Podman, close to Docker,
which matched my interest. The rest of the skills and exam stayed the same, so I went with 9.3.
Through Rapid Track (RH199) and EX200 I can, unaided:
- Essential tools: shell, redirects, grep/regex, SSH, permissions, archiving
- Software and scripting: RPM repos, packages, basic shell scripts
- Running systems: boot/targets, processes, journals, network services, secure file transfer
- Storage and filesystems: GPT partitions, LVM, UUID/label mounts, VFAT/ext4/XFS, NFS, autofs/automounter
- Services and boot: cron/at/systemd timers, services at boot, bootloader (GRUB) changes
- Networking: IPv4/IPv6, hostname resolution, firewalld
- Users and security: accounts/groups, sudo, SSH keys, SELinux (enforcing/permissive, contexts, booleans, port labels)
- Containers (V9.3): Podman (Docker-like)
In production I combine that with migrations: in-place Red Hat 7 to 8 upgrades via Leapp,
including moving boot partitions, GRUB changes, filesystem work and
SSSD configuration for LDAP integration.
Credly: RHCSA (EX200)
Credly: Rapid Track RH199
EX200 exam objectives
Comfortable with
Daily stack
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Ubuntu
- Windows Server
- Mail servers (Mailborder / Postfix-based)
- Veeam
- DataCore
- VMware (incl. HA)
- Proxmox
- Portainer
- Podman
- Docker
- TrueNAS
- Nextcloud
- Basic networking
- NetBox
- Hardening: RHEL on a CIS baseline (homelab fully CIS-based)
- Windows Server hardening and AD policies
- Qualys and Wazuh
Experience / growing
Expanding platforms
- Ansible
- k3s / Rancher (building knowledge)
- HPE Alletra and Nimble
- SAN / FC switches
- Splunk
Virtualisation and cloud ops
- VMware (HA, on-prem workloads)
- Proxmox
- Private cloud / managed IaaS context
- On-call and high availability
Hardware and storage
- HPE: DLs, blades, SPP updates
- Alletra and Nimble storage
- SAN / Fibre Channel switches
- DataCore
- On-prem at customers and in the datacenter
Identity, mail and backup
- Active Directory (policies and hardening)
- SSSD / LDAP integrations
- Mailborder / Postfix mail environments
- Veeam backup
- NetBox documentation/IPAM
Security and monitoring
- CIS hardening (RHEL), also in my own homelab
- Windows Server hardening
- SELinux / firewalld (RHCSA level)
- Qualys, Wazuh
- Splunk (experience)
Automation and containers
- Ansible (growing)
- Podman (RHCSA V9.3)
- k3s / Rancher (knowledge building)
Firewall-ICT / workplace
- Workplace management and migrations
- Laptop/hardware diagnostics
- NAS (TrueNAS, Synology)
- Customer advice and maintenance