The Training Program That 291 Sysadmins Built Their Next Career Move On
Labs that feel like production outages — because they were modeled on real ones. Four structured tracks for mid-career system administrators who want to stop Googling and start knowing.
We'll walk you through the platform live — takes about 20 minutes.
291
Graduates Since 2017
4.7
Avg. Post-Course Rating
87%
Report a Role Change Within 9 Mo.
14
Instructors — All Active Practitioners
How We Structure It
Four Stages. One Outcome: You're the Person They Call When Things Break.
Every track maps to a real workflow stage — from planning infrastructure changes to handling the 3 AM incident that nobody documented. Pick where you need the most help, or run through all four.
Assess & Plan
You learn to audit an existing environment — not with a checklist someone gave you, but by building your own. Covers capacity planning, dependency mapping, and writing change proposals that don't get rejected.
8 weeks. Capstone: a full infrastructure assessment of a simulated 200-seat company.
Deploy & Configure
From bare metal to running services in under a week — that's the pace. You'll provision servers, write configuration-as-code, and build repeatable deployment pipelines. The thing is, we don't hand you a nice clean environment. You inherit messy ones. On purpose.
Monitor & Manage
Alerting rules, metrics pipelines, log aggregation. But also — knowing which alerts to ignore at 2 AM and which ones mean "wake up the team lead." We've pulled real incident patterns from partner organizations for the lab scenarios.
- Build observability stacks from scratch
- Write runbooks that survive your vacation
- Postmortem writing — the skill nobody teaches
Scale & Lead
The senior-track module. Capacity forecasting, budget justification, mentoring juniors, and — honestly — learning to say no to projects that'll sink your team. We added this track in 2022 after graduates kept asking for it.
Prerequisite: completion of at least one other stage, or 5+ years in operations.
Fair warning: we don't cover programming languages in depth. Our lanes are infrastructure, operations, and reliability — not application development. If you need code-heavy training, we'll happily point you elsewhere.
What Makes This Different
Six Things We Get Right That Most Training Programs Don't
Instructors With Pager Duty
Every one of our 14 instructors still works in operations. They're not full-time teachers — they teach because they want to, between on-call rotations. That matters.
Labs, Not Lectures
Roughly 70% of every session is hands-on. The other 30% is context, war stories, and Q&A. We tried the 50/50 split early on. Students hated it.
Cohorts of 10
Small groups. Everyone gets direct time with the instructor. No "raise your hand and wait 20 minutes" situation.
Messy Environments
Our lab servers have outdated configs, undocumented services, and mystery cron jobs — because that's what real infrastructure looks like on day one of a new job.
Career Support After
Resume review. Mock interviews. A Slack alumni channel with about 180 active members who post job openings before they hit public boards. It's not magic — but it's a real network.
Roll Into the Next Cohort
Life happens. If you fall behind, you join the next cohort at the point where you left off. No extra charge. We've had people do this three times. No judgment.
From the Alumni
In Their Words, Not Ours
"I enrolled mostly because my boss offered to pay for it — honestly wasn't expecting much. Three months later I was running our migration to a new monitoring stack. Alone. And it went fine. That would not have happened before this course."
Tara Henrikson
Platform Engineer, Ridgepoint Logistics
"The deploy track pushed me harder than any job interview ever did. And yeah, that capstone project came up in every single interview I had afterward."
Marcus Chen
Senior Sysadmin, Oakmont Credit Union
"Look, I've done a lot of training courses. Most of them are basically expensive slideshows. This was the first one where I actually built something I could point to. The scheduling was tight — doing evenings while working full-time was rough — but worth it."
Keisha Williams
IT Operations Manager, BrightPath Health
"Short version: it works."
Raj Patel
Infrastructure Analyst, Cornerstone Legal Group
Questions
Stuff People Ask Before Signing Up
Who is this actually for?
Mid-career sysadmins with at least a couple of years in IT operations. You should be comfortable with a command line and have managed servers in some capacity. We don't do entry-level — not because we're snobs about it, but because our labs assume baseline knowledge and we'd be setting beginners up to struggle. If you're transitioning from helpdesk and have some server experience on the side, talk to us first.
How much time per week?
About 10-14 hours. Two live sessions per week (evenings or Saturday mornings — you pick), plus self-paced lab time. It's a lot, honestly. We don't sugarcoat that part.
What does it cost?
Contact us for current pricing. It varies by track and cohort size. Payment plans are available. About 40% of our students get their employer to cover it — we can provide a letter to help with that conversation.
Is everything remote?
Yes. All labs, sessions, and office hours are remote. Browser-based access to lab environments — no local setup needed.
Will I get a certification?
We issue a completion certificate, but let's be direct — it's not a vendor certification and we don't pretend it is. What you will have is a portfolio project and real skills that show up in interviews. Roughly 55% of graduates go on to pursue a vendor cert afterward and tell us the coursework helped.
Can my employer pay for it?
Absolutely — and we make it easy. We provide an ROI letter, W-9, and a one-page course description formatted for L&D department approval. Just ask.
See the Platform Before You Commit
A 20-minute demo covers more than a brochure ever could. We'll walk through the labs, show you the cohort schedule, and answer anything that's on your mind.
Book a Live DemoLet's Talk
Book a Live Demo of the Platform
Fill out the form and one of our team will set up a live walkthrough — usually within 4 hours during business days. We'll show you the lab environment, walk through the curriculum, and answer whatever you need to know. No pressure, no pitch deck.
Basecamp Ops LLC
1899 Wynkoop St, Suite 250
Denver, CO 80202
Mon–Fri 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM MT