What this is
I started Becoming Cyber to help people get their first job in cybersecurity. I’m writing it again because that first job is being automated — and the uncomfortable part is that a lot of it should be.
Almost everyone I respect in this field learned in the same chair: the bottom of a security operations center, working the alert queue. It was repetitive, it was underpaid, and most organizations could never staff it properly anyway. Handing that grind to software is overdue. But that queue was never only grind. It was also a school — where you learned to tell a real threat from noise, and built the instinct no certification teaches. The toil and the training came bundled. Hand the toil to machines, and the apprenticeship quietly goes with it.
That is the apprenticeship problem, and it is what this newsletter is now about. Not “how do you land your first cybersecurity job,” but: what does it mean to become — and remain — a cybersecurity professional while the way in is being rebuilt underneath you?
This is early and it is uneven, and it is not a jobs apocalypse. But even in the gentlest version, the question stands. If the work a beginner learned on is now done by software, how does anyone still learn it?
Who it’s for
Two people, and I write for both at once.
If you’re trying to get in: the route is changing, and I’d rather tell you the truth about it than hand you last year’s directions.
If you lead a team: you climbed a ladder you can no longer offer the people you are now responsible for growing. The bill for ignoring that comes due on a horizon longer than any quarter.
What you can expect
An issue every two weeks. No hype, no invented numbers, and no pretending the old map still works when it doesn’t. When I can’t source a claim, I’ll say so.
There’s a companion to this one. CyberFuture is where I write the same shift at board altitude — what it costs an institution when the way in stops working. This one asks what it takes to become a cybersecurity professional while that way in is being rebuilt. Different rooms, same argument. CyberFuture appears when something warrants it; this arrives every two weeks, because you should know when to expect it.
The archive going back to 2021 stays up. That was the world before this shift — the ladder as it actually worked — and the argument I’m making now only makes sense standing on it.
Who I am
I’m Oritse J. Uku. I’m a practicing security executive — a board-appointed subsidiary CISO at a large regulated financial institution — and before that I built and ran security operations and commanded enterprise incidents. I came into the field the unusual way: U.S. Army intelligence, a few years in finance, then a bank’s cyber threat-intelligence team. No computer science degree. I also sit on the advisory board of a company building autonomous (“agentic”) security tooling, which is how I see how fast the ground is moving.
A note on where I stand
I write as a security executive in financial services and as an advisory-board member of a company building autonomous (“agentic”) security tools. The second one is worth stating plainly rather than in a footnote: this newsletter argues that agentic systems are absorbing entry-level security work, and I hold a position in the category that argument favors. I’ll repeat that on any issue where it’s relevant. I use only public information about that company, and I keep anything non-public — about it or about my employer — out of what I write here.
