Re-skill into one of the AI-resistant adjacencies within 18 months: SRE/platform engineering, security engineering, or AI-infrastructure (model serving, GPU ops) — these subspecialties are still in genuine shortage while generic sysadmin/sys-eng work is the part of the stack being eaten fastest.

Earn the 'senior' title in the next role and target a top-tier employer (FAANG-adjacent, frontier-AI infra co, or major cloud provider) — being stuck at 'mid' at 34 with 10 YoE is the biggest single signal pulling the score down, and a same-role title bump plus employer upgrade lifts transfer value 3-5×.

Ship something public this year — an open-source contribution to a widely-used infra project, a substantial technical blog series, or a conference talk — moves the network signal off 'passive_profile' and is the cheapest way to differentiate from the hundreds-of-thousands pool.