An Unfortunate Sour Spot

As of right now, I have five blog posts, all from different points in the year I have not published yet. This has lead me to create a new category of posts I’ll call the BLTN (Better late than never) posts. I will get to finishing those eventually, but in the meantime, I’ll give a quick recap as to why the blog posts have slowed down.

Entry Level Work?

The field of cybersecurity is complex and is a job typically associated with technical work and high pressure situations. Professionals in the field must have a deep understanding of various technical to resolve situations and non-technical aspects to communicate information to management. Perhaps it is no surprise that over the years, I have found that many people do not think there is such a thing as a true entry level cyber-security role. The deep knowledge required for cyber is usually gained through years of working general IT jobs such as help desk. Many graduates from my major end up taking the path of general IT to get into cybersecurity. However, there are also many college graduates like myself who have been lucky enough to get a coveted entry-level position in cyber straight out of college. At this point in my career, I began to contemplate multiple decisions I have made. Was it wrong to skip working in general IT? Did I take the wrong position to start my career? As silly as it sounds, I do wonder if I should have taken the same career path as some of my colleagues in general IT, but I know they would kill to be where I am at right now.

Sour Spot

Back in college, I was highly encouraged to obtain certifications related to my field of work, cybersecurity. Being the lazy student I was, I did not listen to that advice until I got into the workforce. During my period of unemployment, I was able to catch up with some old classmates of mine over LinkedIn. These colleagues took the general IT approach I mentioned earlier with many of them still working in IT help desk roles as their first role out of college. These jobs tend to provide simple technical support and assistance to users within an organization. I was lucky enough to skip this stage of my career and jump straight into cybersecurity with my position eventually branching out to a cloud technology specialization. I even went as far as obtaining a few industry specific certifications in Cloud.

I mention this because funny enough, I am now being told that the certifications and experience I do have are too specific. For those who don’t know, Cybersecurity is already a specialized role, my work in cloud security is even more specialized. Most professionals do not enter a role like cloud security until they are at around 5 years of experience. With this realization, I was practically told that I needed more general knowledge and experience. With only 3 years of experience in cyber (including my specialized cloud experience) I was too inexperienced for senior level roles, but at the same time, too experienced for most lower-level cyber roles. At the same time, I am too experienced for jobs in general IT, but am told by employers that they were hoping for someone with MORE general IT experience than me. With the amount of layoffs going around, these hiring managers know they have a plethora of qualified candidates to go through. Usually, 3 years of experience is enough to land something, but it does not seem to be the case at this time. I really am in an unfortunate sour spot right now.

Gaining Experience without Gaining Experience?

I had to reflect on my resume and realize that despite being at a good place, I still have to make my resume stand out. After all, I am now competing with professionals who have been laid off at Google, Meta, and other tech giants. The first step of this process is getting more certifications and I decided to start out with one that I should’ve gotten a long time ago.

I’ve been told that the Security+ is typically seen as a certification that students go for when they want to break into the field of cybersecurity. Due to the high cost of a Security+ exam attempt ($404 to be exact), I have usually opted not to go for it. After all, I already found my first role in cybersecurity. However, with the job market being more competitive, I now see why this certification was important. Studying the Security+ exam has helped me fill in the gaps of my knowledge and served as a great review session for everything I learned in my degree plus some additional concepts that were poorly covered during my schooling.

I passed the exam as of last month and in reality, I probably studied longer than I needed to. I’m just saying, when it costs $404 to take the exam, I would want to make sure I am fully prepared to pass so I don’t have to waste money on a second attempt. In even better news, I did not even need to pay full price due to my brother’s student discount which brought the price down from $404 to $262.

The exam itself did not feel too difficult but it was frustrating as the bulk of the questions were centered around trying to trick you. Most of the multiple choice questions gave you two answers that seemed correct but allowed you to only choose one. I have been told that this is purposely done. Many professionals have disagreed with this approach as real-life scenarios in cybersecurity tend to have a clear solution rather than two ambiguous ones. But other than this source of frustration, I am thankful I took the time to complete this certification that I missed back in college.

Home Lab

I was rejected for a job in firewall security awhile back. One of the security engineers on that team was kind enough to add me on LinkedIn and provided me with further insights. While he was not direct in his feedback, he did hint that the interview panel believed I knew my stuff, I just needed to brush up on it again and gain more practice. So what better way to gain experience without actually gaining “experience” than to setup a home lab environment.

I won’t explain this diagram too much. But I am hoping this project will get me more experience needed to have more talking points during interviews. Getting back into the job market is tough, but I feel like I’m getting there.

Experience?

Despite this period in my life, I have been able to keep myself busy with projects such as my Church and my Anime Expo role (Which I will make another blog post about soon). The road back to employment is longer than I hoped, but it should hopefully soon be over.