Career Advice

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Hey All,

Just looking for some possible advice on starting my training. I've been in the IT industry for around 6 years in an Operations support role at my company. Mostly system administration and application support type activities. I'm leaning towards a career in Security since my company is actively looking for more security professionals.

I'm looking for opinions on where I should begin. I was thinking about the CCNA training path to being because it would give me a great understanding of the networking side of things. After that i would pursue more of the security tracks. Either by starting on the CCNA Security or diving into the CISSP Certification track. Then I could also throw the CEH training on top of that. Right now i'm more overwhelmed with the amount of training available and would like to plot a good course for my training. I would love to hear everyone's feedback and opinions on what they consider the best outline of training to take.

Thanks!

Brian,

The key is to figure where you would like to be let's say in 5 years time. This will help to direct you where you should begin. It' doesn't mean you have to stick to a particular track, especially with ITProTV since our subscribers get access to all of it.

Visualizing where you see yourself in 5 years is a great strategy now. This way you can plan, prepare and design your learning path for the immediate future. It's then you find your passion leads you in a different direction.

It seems like your heading for an IT security related path which is awesome, since the industry is saying that they need 1,000,000+ IT security personnel as fast as they can get ready. This is a great field study in. This is by the far the most rapidly changing IT field of study you can purse and it will be in high demand forever.

Like everything in this fields, all the the intermediate and advanced certification begin with solid foundations about the fundamentals in security concepts and implementation. Also remember there may be other prerequisites for some of the more advanced certs so make sure you take a look at those too. This isn't to frighten you away from them but to get you to consider those before you head down a track that you may find out you're not able to achieve with years of experience or even a sponsor.

Cordially,
Ronnie Wong
Host, ITProTV

Thanks, Ronnie!

I guess my main goal is to build the solid foundation about the fundamentals as you have mentioned. I think below is going to be my starting point.

CCNA - For Networking fundamentals. I realize the CCNA course is vendor specific, but I feel like it should cover most of the items that Network+ covers as well.
Security+ - For a baseline security course.
CCNA Security - For additional Network security
CEH
SSCP
CISSP