I was speaking with a budding cyber security professional the other day and he asked how long it takes to begin a career in cyber security and what he would need to know and do to be an attractive hire. There’s a few concepts you need to understand and some certificates to earn, but you don’t need years of study or a college degree to begin earning in the cyber security industry.

YouTube has a great many videos to get the concepts. You can start by watching a few of those. Next you’ll want to build your toolbox. Using Oracle’s free VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org), you can install a Linux Virtual Machine that has most of the tools a security professional uses. We recommend either Linux Parrot (https://parrotlinux.org) or Kali (https://www.kali.org). 

There are plenty of YouTube videos teaching viewers how to use the applications in these Linux releases. Two of my favorite channels are Null Byte and Hak5. From there, you can get some good background on the tools, but you’ll beed to practice using those tools before getting your first cyber security job.

In your quest for certification, you’ll need CompTIA’s Security + to have any credibility in the industry. That’s just the starting point, though. As you strengthen your skills and gain work experience, you should be pursuing higher certs like EC Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Cisco’s Certified Network Associate Security (CCNA Security), and ultimately a high level cert like (ISC)2 Certified Information Systems Security Professionual (CISSP).

Since there are several disciplines in the industry, you may find certain activities that you find more interesting than others, whether it’s network security, ethical hacking, artificial intelligence, programming, or other sepcializations. Your interest and talent will guide your career path but you can be sure of one thing, cyber security professionals are in high demand and receive generous compensation compared with other fields. So I hope you can see that if you’re interested in a career in cyber security, it’s an attainable and worthwhile pursuit. 

We welcome comments and questions you may have exploring your options.