This is a sponsored guest post.
There are millions of pieces of advice on how to roll through a career in information security, especially if you are a newbie. Here are some of the most basic tips that can help you in your professional life:
- Start learning from wherever you can, and continue doing that. There is no need to get into all the details right from the beginning. Follow the natural trajectory while still maintaining your fire for learning. You don’t need to choose your specialization right away.
- Slowly, you will start to get some direction when you follow and focus more on the things that appeal to you. Try to go through with the process, no matter what it takes. Slowly and steadily, you will get there.
- It’s okay if your preferences change over time. If at the beginning, you are more fascinated by forensic analysis, but later on, you find ethical hacking more interesting, then so be it. You can switch to ethical hacking or pentesting by taking an ethical hacking course anytime.
- Whatever your area of interest, there will always be extra things out of your ‘primary job’ that will distract you or pull you towards them. It’s okay to let yourself be attracted towards them and satisfy your curiosity as long as you are firm about your priorities.
- There are a million things that you will have to keep up with in your field. If you are working in cybersecurity, you will really need to stay on top of new discoveries, new threats, and new advancements. Build a staying-up-to-date process that works for you.
- Cybersecurity is a dynamic field, it’s hardly static. You will always have to juggle between things and things change so fast in the cyber world that it could get easily overwhelming for the new ones. But when that happens, stay calm and motivated. Don’t lose your head or get exhausted by the inputs.
- Communication skills have no substitute. Find the right words to say or write when communicating with someone outside your field. Everyone is different, and everyone has a different set of rules when it comes to understanding. Try to observe your audience before you suggest them something. This will help you put your point across in a friendly manner without appearing threatening to the receiver.
- When you start learning formally, give importance to the teacher and the course material, rather than the status of the institute. In the bigger scheme of things, what matters is how well you have learnt and understood something and how well you apply it. There are plenty of platforms that provide a remarkable CEH course training program to people with different levels of experience. Same goes for other cybersecurity courses.
- What makes you stand out, at the end of the day, is how well you do your job. Your teammates and bosses will love it if you stay proactive and lessen their burden of responsibility. Everyone appreciates people who make their leaves easier.
- Connecting with people can be hard for people, but if you do it at your own pace, then you will never have a problem networking. Connect with others as much as you feel and however you feel. There are no hard and fast rules to networking. If you are a private, introverted person, then knowing someone for a long time before initiating a heartfelt connection with them is more effective than straight-up jumping for a rapport.
- Cybersecurity is a technical field but you can keep it as technical as you want. This means that while you should know what things and terminologies mean, you can choose to develop your own language or understanding with the field. Every technical thing can be stripped down to simple English and your focus should always be ‘to understand and explain clearly’ rather than ‘to appear smart’.
