THREAD ON HOW I GOT INTO THE CYBER/TECH INDUSTRY!!!

First, I'm going to start off by saying I don't have an engineering or BCIS degree. I'll make another thread on how the degree that I have and how I leveraged it to learn the things I wanted to learn that would help me

I landed my first tech job with Southwest Airlines in 2016 doing NOC analyst work. Before that, I was working in geek squad. So, since coming to college I always do I was going to do cybersecurity. I had the hard part figured out. I knew exactly what i wanted to to do and i

created a roadmap that would allow me to do this. After my first year in community college. I crafted a resume that gear towards entry-level networking jobs( How can you secure a network if you don't anything about networking?) By this time I had completed the cisco academy

and took an intro to cybersecurity course. So, I had no real experience in the industry just lab experience and coursework. So, the way I crafted my resume was, I added that I attended the cisco academy, the projects I completed within my courses and relevant courses

after crafting my resume I posted them on monster, career builder, and indeed. this was before I started utilizing Linkedin. Once i posted my resume i immediately started getting hits, but once the recruiter made contacts they would often ghost me

so, this really discouraged me. This part right here just happens to be the right place right time. So, one of the recruiters that actually had reached out to me ended up coming to best buy to get his computer fixed and we bumped into each other

and as I'm going over what was fixed on his computer and stuff like that I notice his name and went into talking about the job we talked about. he was really impressed with how i was able to explain what was wrong and how we fixed it. The next day I had an interview.

The interview went well and I was offered a position. It was a contract gig through teksystems btw. so after the contract ended 9 months later, I relayed to my recruiter that i wanted more hands-on experience with Linux, by this time i was already running Linux servers at home

I would always try to keep myself ahead, this was also around the time I was taking my Linux configuration class, this class had us primarily using CentOS basically the free version of red hat. I was able to sit for the exam free and i passed my RHCA.

So me passing the RHCA played a big role in me getting a Linux admin job. Why Linux? why not jump right into security? well, Linux is pretty important when it comes to security most of the time you're going to be dealing with Linux systems. Also learning the CLI

puts you in a great position to learn bash, shell, python and other scripting languages. this makes you more marketable. Hiring manager love ppl that can script here and there. So during my interview, there was actually a hands on lab that I had to complete, luckily I had just

taken my RHCA so everything was pretty fresh. I passed the interview and got the job. These 2 jobs really made the rest of my journey easy especially once I explained to hiring managers why I took that route. It showed them that I was passionate and I was open to learning

Fast forward to things I was doing outside of school and my job. By this time I discovered kali Linux and I instantly got hooked into the offensive portion of security. I naturally have a curious mind so this is when I started learning about why certain tools did what they did

and why you get certain things in logs, I wasn't just interested in seeing the end results of accessing a box I wanted to understand the entire process so i created an entire lab dedicated to pentesting utilizing vmware, windows 2008 server that had 3 diff systems

connected to it, a web server, a firewall , security onion and multiple flavors or Linux. I wanted to understand how trying to hack into each of these boxes would respond and what type of logs they would create. After doing this a few months a started doing CTFs

Me doing CTFs is literally when my world changed, I was meeting ppl that were security geniuses man and I was soaking up anything I could learn from. Also, remember these competitions are full of hiring managers, recruiters, and other security professionals.

So, the very first CTF that I attended my soon to be CIO had actually designed this box and I had the #7 out of ~30 ppl score on this box and I was the only person that was in college that was doing this box. the creator of the box was super impressed and offered an internship

offered to interview me that upcoming week. The crazy thing about this is he told me, I was always going to hire you. we just have to interview candidates. so, i get to this internship and i go bezerk, literally, I'm doing everything. I'm developing scripts bc they

didn't have visibility to certain system logs. so I create scripts that are pulling this data and feeding it into Splunk, I'm doing brown bags on projects that I'm working on personally and boom my end of the internship project comes

this was around the time when a hacker was using company printer to print things out saying go subscribe pewdiepie on YT. so immediately i started thinking oh wow wonder if we're vulnerable. i presented my case on why i wanted to do this and it was approved.

so my end of the year project was me conducting a pentest on the company printer network. I was able to get roo access to 55 out of 117 printers. wrote documentation on how i did it and the recommendations on how to fix it.

this internship set the pace for everything else, after that, i never had to apply to another internship. My manager at the time was well connected in the cyber security space in my area and he would literally tell his friends to hire me bc his company didn't have the budget

to keep me as an intern. This guy referred me to 4 of my 5 internships.

Fast forward to my FT employment, by this time I have a great following on Linkedin. I'm active on there and I'm sharing the projects that I'm working on. During, my junior year of college a recruiter reached out to me offering me a new grad position, I declined bc I was still

in school taking 18 hours and doing an internship, so I wouldn't have time for it. She was like ok and said she would circle back around closer to when I graduate, so closer to the end of the first semester of my junior year I started reaching out to recruiters

about new grad positions on linkedin and I would always land an interview. fast forward to my senior year, the recruiter that previously reached out to me beforehand, seen that I was working on a new project and decided to reach out again

around this time all my classes were online so, I was like why not. Also, around this time I was already interviewing and had offers from Citi Bank, Cisco, Google, Verizon, and Mcafee. So, I had leverage when it came to negotiating.

I negotiated my salary and boom that's how I landed my first FT in the cybersecurity industry