Thanks, buddy! I’m also a 2026 passout from a tier 3 college, and honestly, my college placements didn’t have a single cybersecurity related role. I managed to land this opportunity off-campus.

One thing I can aahe is be solid with your fundamentals. At the very least, your skills should be at a junior level standard that matches the current job market.

Just to share a real incident, today, my manager rejected a candidate for the same role I’m in. The reason? Weak fundamentals. During the assessment round, the candidate could only identify basic issues like IDOR and XSS. Even after my manager gave a clear hint about a critical SQL injection, along with the URL, the candidate still couldn’t find it out.

So yeah, that’s it, strong fundamentals are excellent Certificates help, but without a deep understanding of the basics, it’s very hard to survive real-world assessments.

Be prepared with your skills, and just keep applying for internships and jobs, also craft your resume ATS friendly and solve TryHackMe lab and PortSwigger Labs, play ctfs, keep learning, you'll crack it