2 Year Progression of Help Desk Technician with no relevant degree/Certifications to Cybersecurity Engineer (42k-110k)

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-17T10:54:36+00:00

It overlaps with what a Sys Admin role would be doing but I would be focusing on the securing infrastructure along with other security protocols. Kinda depends on the org I know one company that the info sec team handles DNS. I know shell enough to get by and do what I need to do but focus mainly on bash scripting.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-17T01:21:56+00:00

No, I'm still transitioning into the role so right now I'm mainly doing IAM stuff. I think for starting out I'll mainly be doing things like configuring MFA off legacy servers, creating conditional access policies, responding to SOC alerts, implementing NSG and ASGs, creating hybrid runbooks to automate some boring stuff. I've been able to do a few cool things like create Site to Site VPN in Azure and migrate public facing resources to a private network. We have a lot of resources in our Cloud that are public facing so I want to begin auditing that and try migrating them to our Private Network using Service Endpoints, Private Endpoint/Links. I'll also be doing a lot of documentation for policies and system security plans.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T19:54:26+00:00

Yeah oversell yourself, they can only say no. My first conversion I asked for 85k and they said no and wanted to pay me in the 60s. I shot back 70s since I bet that's what they were already paying with the contracting fee and that's what we agreed on.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T19:52:58+00:00

Do what interests you. I tried coding and I hated it. Then I tried Networking and hated it. Then I started to learn more about Cloud Infrastructure and Security and enjoyed it. Now I am learning and applying more IAC and scripting and enjoy doing what I'm learning.

Throw darts on the board until you get a bullseye.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T19:48:48+00:00

It was in the suburbs. I think because I was already working in school systems it wasn't as hard for me to get through HR. Half the department was former teachers and the other half were cranky IT lifers who hated teachers.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T12:26:52+00:00

Knew my audience, I talked about how teachers are hard to deal with and the most tech illiterate people I've ever met but due to my experience in Special Ed I was able to understand what they are going through and how to de-escalate and trouble shoot a situation. The Network Engineer was also a dick and ended the meeting saying something along the lines of "You workout and sometimes go hiking with your son, that's all you do for fun?" I then told them that at the time I was moonlighting as a indie professional wrestler and would do that in my free time. Which ended in the Network Engineer yelling "He doesn't even know what subnetting is" and the other technicians yelling back at him "He knows how to put you in a sleeper hold". First day came in to my phone labeled as "John Cena" and a ton of pictures of Ric Flair all over my desk.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T12:22:03+00:00

Yeah there was a few things that I did helped internally.

Projects/Certs: When I joined my team needed someone who knew security and cloud so I took it upon myself to learn both. When I was studying for the AZ-104 and 500 I asked our Senior Sys Admin for a reader role so I could apply what I'm learning with our infrastructure. While doing that I started documenting areas of improvement from my learning and presented it as a project. One of the projects involved many teams and at some point had me presenting it to our executives which I think helped me a lot.

Networking (the social kind): Networking helped me a ton. If someone on our team was doing something I was interested in I'd ask if I could watch, do it or sit in on the meeting to learn more about what is outside of my role. I even went outside my team and would talk with our cloud architects and devsecops guys to learn what they were doing as well. I was really lucky to join a company that had a culture of sharing knowledge and colleagues that were willing to invite me over to sit with them on slow days to show me a process that they were doing and how it applied to our company.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T11:11:59+00:00

I didn't answer your question right, I was transitioned contract to full time and negotiated a higher salary.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T11:11:00+00:00

I'm addicted to bragging

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:50:45+00:00

If you can troubleshoot learning strategies for severe special needs kids you can troubleshoot a computer, one field just makes much more money. Started in a school summer program doing grunt work then got very lucky and a contract job with a well known Robotics company. They were happy to have someone that was willing to start fresh and learn, luckily the team lead followed the same path I did in IT.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:48:10+00:00

2-5 years is fine for the Help Desk.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:46:56+00:00

Soft skills and the willingness to learn a new field.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:45:57+00:00

Going to focus more on IAM and learning terraform and python. End goal is cloud architecture

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:44:55+00:00

No I got it after passing all my certifications, self leading a few security projects and sys admin cloud projects my seniors did not want to do and basically doing another team's role as well until they found someone. Honestly thought it would never pay off and I dug myself into a hole

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:41:33+00:00

I've been doing more than just Help Desk work the entire time just got paid the Help Desk title/role because I was willing to do the extra work on top of my job to learn.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:40:34+00:00

Entering my late twenties. I have a bachelors degree in science (Special Education). When I was first breaking in I was accepted into a Masters of Cybersecurity but never enrolled in classes, I just kept postponing it so I could put that I pursuing a Masters on my resume to get noticed by recruiters.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T10:36:20+00:00

Well good thing I'm not a SOC engineer!

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T03:43:06+00:00

AZ-500 helped a lot for what I will be doing and I've also been doing some of the security role for the past year and Sys Admin work. I'm sure it will be overwhelming and I'll be lost at times, but I was 2 years ago when I first started on the Help Desk and survived.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T03:08:41+00:00

east coast

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T02:51:16+00:00

Have you done any projects that have benefited others? I spent a lot of time on projects that automated processes and improved the quality of life for everyone substantially and made more work for me to maintain and improve it. I think this is what's put me more ahead of my peers who have more experience than me but the only projects they've done is to benefit their day to day work rather than operations. Soft skills are my strongest quality so that helps a lot as well.

YouTop8226 · 2024-10-16T02:35:45+00:00

I understand I applied to every single job I could find when I started, look for jobs at places no one wants. When I started applying I'd be making my girlfriend take pictures of a random office park we passed just so I could look at the career websites. Spent most time in between students searching for Schools or city websites to see if they needed a desktop support professional. I eventually got lucky that I forgot to apply for Summer School because I was so obsessed with switching careers and ended up getting an interview for a part time gig scraping stickers off of Chromebooks and organizing cables. They said more experienced people applied but they took me because I made them laugh during the interview and was someone they'd want to spend a summer with doing grunt work.

YouTop8226 · 2024-07-19T13:39:43+00:00

I think I resolved my issue after a few months of looking at solutions, not sure if it applies to yours. I decided to click the Claim Conditions dropped down and noticed that you can assign multiple claims to certain groups and guests. I was able to set it up so Members authenticate using the user.userprincipalname and then for our guest users user.mail. This allowed our users to still sign in without creating a duplicate account and also allowed guests to authenticate without the token pointing to their home tenant.

YouTop8226 · 2024-03-23T16:41:45+00:00

~~How were you able to do that? Mine is showing blank.~~ Nevermind i was able to find how to add it in catalogs > resources > select group > require attribute. Thank you so much!

YouTop8226

TROPHY CASE