Weekly thread for any and all career, learning and general guidance questions. Thinking of taking a training or going for a cert? Wondering how to level up your career? Wondering what NOT to do? Got other questions? This is the time and place to ask!
I’m not sure if this is the right venue for this question so please let me know if that is the case – happy to ask elsewhere!
I’ve been in various IT roles for the past 10 years and seem to have gotten stuck in a support capacity. My career goal is to be more of a DevSecOps or Security Engineering role but I honestly can’t get the time of day with an interviewer. I’ve got experience with programming, cloud infrastructure, web application security, and am currently going for my CKA but I don’t have a ton of experience “on paper”. Most of my experience is either me doing things myself to further my knowledge or taking on security things within my current role – for ex. in one support role I did a web application penetration test to make sure there weren’t any gaping holes before we deployed it.
How can I make sure that I have the right experience down on paper for when I’m applying to roles? Has anyone here “broken out” of a support role into security? What was your experience with it? I also have a lot of interest in doing research work and I know this can dovetail with the two roles I listed above but maybe I need to focus on the core ideas of those roles more?
This is what I made this playbook for. This will always vary from hiring team to hiring team but for me I look for practical skills/experience & the desire to learn more. Enthusiasm is easily mastered for interviews but proving your skills is harder. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to demonstrate your capabilities, many of which I talk about in the playbook. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, because for w/e reason this industry still hasn’t figured out how to not gatekeep for one reason or another but I think you’ll make it easier on yourself by focusing on practical, demonstrable skills and documenting them. Hopefully that helps!
Awesome! I really appreciate your help and will absolutely start going through this and what my resume looks like.
Also, right?! How is it that in an industry that has a deficit of security personnel in it already is so damn hard to break into?!