How To Find Your Cybersecurity Passion
How To Find Your Cybersecurity Passion
Cybersecurity is an exciting career field with a diversity of roles. Ethical hackers may come to mind for a lot of people. But there’s so much more to cybersecurity. How can you find the role that you’ll be passionate about? There are some good resources to help you find a target role to begin your cybersecurity career, which suit your interests and skill sets.
Learn By Viewing
YouTube is a great resource for learning about cybersecurity careers. You can find some articulate, experienced and passionate professionals to explain all the different types of cybersecurity jobs.
Dr. Gerald Auger’s YouTube video, 5 Entry Level Cyber Jobs You Need to Know About, is a reliable resource. Dr. Auger lays out common job duties, required soft skills, job growth, and median salary for each of these roles. He also explains the downside of each role, which is surprisingly helpful. After all, when trying to decide which role suits you, it is generally helpful to determine early which roles don’t suit you.
The roles which Dr. Auger discusses are:
Cyber Defense Incident Responder
Cyber Forensics Expert
Cyber Security Engineers
Cyber Operator
Vulnerability Assessment Analyst
There are certainly more cybersecurity roles, but these are good building blocks for your understanding of entry-level roles. Search “entry level cybersecurity jobs” in YouTube and you’ll find a variety of other videos vying to explain the various roles and responsibilities in cybersecurity.
Learn By Doing
After you get a basic understanding of entry-level cybersecurity roles, one or two may jump out as a good fit for you. Obviously, you don’t want to pursue a cybersecurity role simply based on having watched a couple of videos. You want to get a better feel for whether this role is really what you want. Do you find it intriguing and fulfilling?
Cybrary’s online Career Paths training will be quite useful. It’s a low commitment way to get exposure to and hands-on experience in cybersecurity roles of interest. The Career Paths training include:
Become a SOC Analyst 1
Become a Systems Administrator
Become a Cyber Security Engineer
Become a Penetration Tester
Become an Incident Handler
Become an Azure Cloud Engineer
As you start down a Career Path, if it excites and motivates you to keep learning, then you’re likely on the right path. If it is not what you expected and you're not feeling it, at least you determined that early on. You can back up and try something different. Learning by doing is a valuable way to test your cybersecurity interests.
What Next
Your cybersecurity career will undoubtedly have many twists and turns. You may be quite surprised by what you end up doing ten years from now. But as you seek to find your way into the career field, it’s helpful to find something you’re passionate about. It gives you something to aspire to. Starting your cybersecurity career journey with a goal, based on your interests and aptitude, will provide you with a target to aim for.
