Before deciding to pursue Cyber Security Career
Working in Cyber Security field is never for the faint of heart. It requires lifelong constant learning and experiments in addition to 9–6 job. Lifelong means it is really a lifelong — 20, 30 years from now as long as you work in the field.
Learning on the job may be limited as most of the times you may be applying what you’ve learned. No companies may give you enough time to study for each assigned project. You may be offered yearly 5-day bootcamp training which is definitely never enough.
Cyber security professionals do not disclose their worklife balance to the public. In fact, we don’t really care about worklife balance. We simply keep showing off our achievements, certification, CVEs, Hall-of-Fames, and bounties because we’re proud of ourselves.
Thus, one should only pursue this field only if he is driven by passion. Passion is the only driving factor for all cyber security professionals.
For those who like to switch to this career or want to try it out, one must ask the following questions and think carefully.
- Can I commit to ongoing learning, research, experiment? This includes your personal time after work (both weekdays and weekends). You can rest some time but you will still have to go back to this default time spending. Why do you need to learn lifetime? We’re living in digital world and our economy is largely digital driven. There are always room for improvements which makes new technologies to be evolved. In digital world, the possibility of creation is boundless. With everyone accessibility to education materials at low or no cost, the possibility of learning is boundless. These two facts create endless creation. With each creation comes with insecurity. For each insecurity, you can’t attack stuff unless you know the basics of creation.
2. Can I commit to renew existing certification or take evolving new certification as per job requirements (every 3–5 year)?
3. Can I handle work stress and work hong hours in long term?
4. Can I handle relationship problems for not being able to give enough time to my partner? Can he/she accept the nature of job requirement?
5. Can I handle frequent work life balance issue?
This post is by no means to demotivate people but educate them on long term commitment requirements in Cyber Security field.
We are never near future to rely on sophisticated AI tools to replace human intelligence on Cyber Security.
Reference:
https://dailyhappy.life/menu/career/
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