I retired from the IT/Cyber grind but I still got young folks reaching out to me, wasting their time trying to learn "skills" because old timers still wanna gatekeep because they had to do it the hard way. Languishing in the Help Desk or the SOC for 10 years before reaching the big boy jobs.
There are varieties of the Hard Way
The traditional hard way = Help Desk to System Administrator to Network Engineer to Information Security Officer or Cybersecurity Analyst
This takes about 10 years, imagine the time you are wasting. Imagine the salary you are forgoing. A Cybersecurity Analyst makes about 80K a year? You gonna wait 10 years to get 80K?
The SOC Analyst Hard Hard Way = Help Desk to System Administrator to SOC Analyst to Information Security Officer or Cybersecurity Analyst
This might take you 8 years. So you get to the money faster but you gonna go spend bulk of your time in the SOC. You don't wanna be in the SOC. It's a low budget, low vibration environment, with no windows and 12 hour shifts.
Now there are some SOCs, where you make 100K a year on a 4 Days/ 10 Hour schedule. Most are not like that. On top of that, you don't learn shit in a SOC besides more networking, incident response, threat hunting and these are not high paying skills in 2024 and beyond.
We want the fucking money as fast as possible.
So, you can do what I call, the Six Figure Hard Way.
Six Figure Hard Way = Help Desk to System Administrator to DevOps Role (SRE, Infrastructure, Platform or whatever) to Cloud Security Engineer
This way is still hard, but the goal is to get out of the Help Desk fast as possible because fuck the Help Desk. To do this, don't waste your time on the A+, you'll get the Network+ and Security+ first because the content goes together. A+ is two tests and a waste of fucking time.
Six Figure Hard Way Certification Path = Network+ to Security+ to RHSCA to AWS Solutions Architect Associate to AWS Solutions Architect Professional to CISSP
(You have to renew your Security+, get CASP+ or Pentest+ or CySA+ but these certs don't add to your salary. CISSP does and we only care about certs that leads to money.)
This will take you about 8 years, but by the time you reach DevOps Role, you should be making six figures in a MCOL area. Then you jump to Cloud Security Engineer for a better quality of life. This is why you get your CISSP to prepare you for a manager role, working from home, sitting in meetings, avoiding layoffs because you know where all the bodies are buried. You are doing contracting on the side, running it up.
If you are 30 something right now, you should be doing it the Six Figures Hard Way. If you are taking the A+ in your 30s and looking for a Help Desk job, you are doing it the wrong way. By the time you get to your cybersecurity role, you'll have bare minimum technical skills and foregone thousands in salary because you are stuck on "cybersecurity".
Get your Network+ and Security+ out the way and focus on system administration and cloud certifications. You need to learn a technology to survive in the industry.
Cybersecurity isn't a technology, it's a discipline. All the cybersecurity certifications don't mean shit if you are useless on a keyboard. A Help Desk job should be something you do for six months to a year. You use that year to study and network. You should be getting a new industry leading certification year.
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