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, a cybersecurity executive. I was board-appointed CISO of two Northwestern Mutual subsidiaries until August 2026. Before that I led the cyber threat management team for North America at Citigroup, where I served as incident commander on major cybersecurity incidents and built the bank’s first cloud incident-response program. I came into the field the unusual way: U.S. Army intelligence, a few years in finance, then Citi’s Cyber Security Fusion Center. I have no computer science degree. I also serve on the CISO Advisory Program of a company building autonomous (“agentic”) security tools, which is how I see how fast the ground is moving.
A note on where I stand
I write as a cybersecurity executive and as a member of the CISO Advisory Program at a company building autonomous (“agentic”) security tools. The second is worth stating plainly. This newsletter argues that agentic systems are absorbing entry-level security work, and I advise a company in that category, unpaid and with no equity or other economic interest. I repeat that on any issue where it is relevant. I use only public information about that company, and nothing non-public from any role I have held appears here.
