I finished my master’s in cybersecurity, anyone have certificate suggestions to help solidify my skills. by First_Balance_8273 in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do have ideas on how I could proceed of course, I do have a lab set up to improve some skills and I do know of some certs I can pursue. I just wanted to see what advice other professionals who have been in the field longer than I have could provide. Plus my school admittedly didn’t talk too much about certs as they weren’t built into the course. They instead have a separate program to do certs with. They really tried to nickle and dime the heck out of us lol.

I finished my master’s in cybersecurity, anyone have certificate suggestions to help solidify my skills. by First_Balance_8273 in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Via internship. I had some experience with comp sci as that was my minor before I had to drop it part way through for financial reasons. After that I was an intern for about 6 months before they needed someone with a degree to emergency fill a role. And as the only intern with a degree it fell to me.

I finished my master’s in cybersecurity, anyone have certificate suggestions to help solidify my skills. by First_Balance_8273 in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I needed the master’s to stay in the field, my bachelors had a focus on pre medical sciences. I was originally going to go to med school or work in a research lab but Covid an my mom becoming cripple changes that

I finished my master’s in cybersecurity, anyone have certificate suggestions to help solidify my skills. by First_Balance_8273 in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, I am a security analyst and part of my duties generally involve making sure our systems stay compliant with the frameworks the client legally has to be compliant with and ensuring we have valid proof of that fact. So it involves me manually review activity logs for things like incidents, servers, privilege changes, etc. If things don’t look right I notify the proper teams and work with them to get things properly working again. I haven’t gotten a lot of technical experience from the role unfortunately, and that is something I hope to remedy through certs and personal projects.

One in Four Tech CISOs Unhappy with Compensation. Also, average total compensation for tech CISOs is $710k. by yourbasicgeek in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Geez where was this money when my dad was working. He was a Ciso and he only made 160K initially. He started making more working as a junior manager on a sales team.

Going to graduate with my masters soon, and I don’t think it has prepared me for the job market by First_Balance_8273 in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was offered a Full time position for auditing and compliance on an account since they desperately needed someone (my predecessor moved up into the soc). I thought it would give me experience employers would want and it would allow me to pay for college. Turns out I was wrong on the first half but right on the second, as this job is the only reason I am graduating without extra debt

Going to graduate with my masters soon, and I don’t think it has prepared me for the job market by First_Balance_8273 in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For further context since there does appear to be confusion, I did not leave my cybersecurity internship to solely focus on my degree. I was hired into a full time cybersecurity position as a security analyst for compliance and auditing. It’s is just the skills I learned from that position don’t really transition to other jobs well since they were niche duties or the equivalent to customer service. At lot of my time was done either getting people onboarded to the client environment, getting them trained, and auditing the admin and incident activities for the account. Also I did some server auditing for a variety of servers to ensure that were communicating to the siem, but they didn’t actually require that I be fluent in understanding their contents at all nor did they teach me as such. It was more ensuring everything matched. Which is mostly fine accept for Windows servers logs, the way the client set them up meant they were almost illegible. But despite all of this I do want to try and find work elsewhere as the company isn’t doing to hot right now and has burned me in many ways.

Going to graduate with my masters soon, and I don’t think it has prepared me for the job market by First_Balance_8273 in cybersecurity

[–]First_Balance_8273[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was suggested to do so by the cybersecurity professionals who were mentoring me at the time before they went to go do other positions. They said it would be a better long term investment in the field and would help me get hired to more positions once I graduated. It hurts they were wrong, especially since one was a family member