The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for solid cybersecurity practices at companies large and small. Phishing and malicious emails are on the rise, and attackers everywhere are testing networks for unforeseen vulnerabilities. Millions of employees working from home adds another layer of complications to protecting a company’s infrastructure.
As a result, there’s a strong need for cybersecurity specialists, which has led to a problematic cybersecurity skills gap. If you’re interested in cybersecurity as a career, now might prove a great time to jump in.
Why pursue a career in cybersecurity?
IT workers with security certifications tend to have significantly higher average salaries — around 15 per cent more. Majority of leading VC firms to predict that there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs by 2021, up from 1 million openings in 2014.
Every IT position is also a cybersecurity position now. Every IT worker, every technology worker, needs to be involved with protecting and defending apps, data, devices, infrastructure, and people.
Top Natural Skill Set required to build a career in Cybersecurity:
As a cybersecurity professional, problem-solving will play a major role in your day-to-day work. Those in the field need to find creative ways to take on and address complex information security challenges across a variety of existing and emerging technologies and digital environments.
As the name implies, cybersecurity is a technology-focused field: you will be likely be tasked with responsibilities such as troubleshooting, maintaining, and updating information security systems; implementing continuous network monitoring; and providing real-time security solutions. Being technologically savvy is essential in order to perform the daily activities of cybersecurity professionals.
Cybersecurity isn’t just limited to computers: you’ll need to be comfortable working on a variety of operating systems, computer systems, mobile devices, cloud networks, and wireless networks – and keep up to date on advances in the field for all of them.
Being able to defend an organization against cyber breaches requires you to be highly vigilant and detail-oriented, in order to effectively detect vulnerabilities and risks. You’ll likely be responsible for continuous network monitoring and will need to be able to quickly identify concerns and come up with real-time security solutions to address them.
As a cybersecurity specialist, you’ll be working closely with individuals in other roles and departments, and it’s important to be able to effectively communicate and explain your findings, concerns, and solutions to others. It’s important to be able to speak clearly and concisely on cybersecurity strategy and policy, as well as to be able to convey technical information to individuals of different levels of technical comprehension.
While computer forensics and cybersecurity are two separate fields, they’re closely related – and having a foundation in computer forensics can help you excel in your cybersecurity career. To be able to effectively protect organizations’ digital assets and prevent security breaches, you’ll need to have a solid understanding of what happens if your efforts fail, and how compromised data is recovered. Most cybersecurity degree programs will have a computer forensics component for this reason.
As with any technical field, cybersecurity is fast-changing. Anyone who works in the field will need to be committed to keeping current with best practices and emerging industry trends, and will always need to be learning and self-educating – both on and off the clock.
To effectively protect an organization’s network and infrastructure, you’ll need to know how they can be exploited in the first place – that’s why most cybersecurity professionals must learn how to “ethically hack.” Essentially, you need to have the same skills as a hacker, to fully understand how a system could be breached, and in turn, create effective solutions for thwarting these attacks.
How Do You Build Cybersecurity Skills?
While some of the skills listed above are ones you should naturally have – for example, an inclination for analytical thinking and technology – others are ones you will need to develop through formal training or education. Depending on your background, a certificate or training in cybersecurity is a good place to start: they’ll give you a solid foundation in the principles of cybersecurity, in addition to an overview of security across a variety of platforms, programming and development, digital forensic investigation, specific technical skills (such as those relating to computer and operating systems and networking) and more.
And we at trainocate provide a plethora of training and certification courses for cybersecurity from different leading cybersecurity experts such as Trend Micro, CompTIA, Cisco, and others. For more information, you can reach out to us or refer the link here.
