What's Next?

Now that I am graduated from university, I am more motivated than ever to continue learning but hopefully with more hands on practice. That means using open source and paid material to get hands on experience with tooling found in security operations, cloud services, and even AI.

IT certifications are a common way that IT professionals do this, and I am no different with a couple certifications in progress. The next certification I will complete will be the SAL1 blue team certification from TryHackMe, and then I plan to either finishing the Certified Cisco Networking Associate from Cisco or Certified Cloud Practitioner from AWS. I have been studying for the CCNA routing and switching certification on and off for a couple years now, and I keep getting drawn back to it. I think it's because networking is a foundational competency that is useful in any domain whether you're a system administrator, application developer, or security analyst.

In the more long term future, I am considering pursuing the CISSP and SSCP or CSSP depending on which area of expertise is more applicable to my career. I also have plans to attend a graduate level program, but I feel it would be irresponsible to pursue a master's degree without more hands on experience in a specific domain of cybersecurity.