Hi. I am looking into a late career switch (I am in my late 50s), to a Linux administrator/engineer type of position. I have no formal IT education and no related certification of any sort. The same is correct for my formal employment records (I work as a scientist / research engineer if this matters, chemistry/material sciences, that's my formal education).
But... I have almost 30 years of experience doing Linux administrator/engineer jobs. Only, this is all very low profile and I am not paid for it I started in mid 90s with Slackware for my department at the uni where I was then employed. Soon it was Red Hat, later Fedora and from beginning of 2000 Debian based distributions. I've been managing typical IT Linux based environments for SOHO or SME with limited No of users (<20) including LAMP stack, postfix, security, basically all what a small company may need (also web page writing, css, sql integration), plus physical infrastructure in some cases. I am familiar with shell scripting, php, python, sql etc etc. Currently I am administrating 4 vps'es for two small companies, plus some number of physical machines, all Linux based.
Now, the question is, whether this sort of experience is good enough to apply for an entry level job? I was thinking of getting some Red Hat certification just to document some basic, formal level of knowledge/skills, but I am not sure if this would have any significant impact in getting this sort of jobs.
I would appreciate your opinion, not only for the certification part, but also if this sort of experience may count any way.
