What should I title my previous job? (it's complicated)

Posted by ProfessionalPoem8133@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 7 comments

So right now I'm working at an MSP and I'm looking for a new job as it's a pretty terrible position, but that's a different story.

I want some opinions on what to title my previous job on my resume, as the actual job title that HR gave is so vague and unmarketable that I feel the need to change it.

Here are some details to help you all with your answers:

University, worked on a team called "Endpoint Solutions Engineering" in a part-time role (only worked 20 hours per week), eventually moved to the VMWare team still part-time under the same job title.
The job title is called "Lab Assistant"
My job basically involved participating and doing a lot of tasks that the endpoint and virtualization team did not have the time or knowledge to do, such as closing all the tickets, writing many, many automation scripts, conducting security audits and reporting, creating and maintaining custom OS images (both VMWare golden images and SCCM WIM), keeping SCCM deployed applications and endpoints up to date and going through the proper change management processes, updating CI/CD pipelines or modifying them, wrote KBs and SOPs, maintaining desktop pools in our VMWare environment, and a lot more.
I specifically trained interns, they shadowed a lot of the work I did, so I wasn't an intern.
I did NOT work with Azure or M365, that was the cloud team, so no cloud administration. Though we were in the process of migrating to Intune.
I didn't work with any networking below the 5th OSI layer.
I didn't maintain any servers, that was up to the admins and engineers on my team.

So basically, I did a lot of admin work but didn't have the responsibilities of an admin. I also was exposed to and worked with a lot of DevOps methodology since the director of the team at the time was trying to push for IaaS.

Any ideas of what I could title this job on my resume that would be marketable? Thanks!!!

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bluecopp3r@reddit

Mind sharing what the role title actually is? The concern i would have in changing it, is when HR from the prospective company is doing background checks and HR at the current company says, we know/knew him but thats not his job title.

ProfessionalPoem8133@reddit (OP)

Hey! In the post I mentioned the role is titled "Lab Assistant", any thoughts on this?

I spoke with my HR contact and she said acceptance of the title change is going to vary based on location. Where she is and if it were her, if she requested details from your employer that says your title is something else then she'll be wonderinf what else you lied about.

Ok I see. Personally, I'd say speak to an HR person to get their view on retitling a position. I have a contact I could ask but being in a different country the perspective might be different. I worked in a high school and my title was lab technician. However, i was doing the technical tasks of the sysadmin because they didn't have the experience. So my resume has that title and all the duties i performed relating to both roles

Kumorigoe@reddit

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jazzdrums1979@reddit

Jr Systems Admin or Virtualization Admin. If you can get some of the M365 and Azure experience that will round out your resume nicely into a sysadmin IMO.

progenyofeniac@reddit

I second this, but I'd have no problem listing this as "System Administrator" on a job application. "Lab Assistant" is a meaningless way to describe it to prospective employers and if you're making up your own title anyway, make it sound good.