My Cybersecurity Career Advice for 2024
My advice for making 2024 the best year for your Cybersecurity Career
2024 is finally here and along with it .. my annual advice for making this year an amazing one for your Cybersecurity Career.
This year was a crazy one with tech layoffs dominating the first half and AI impacting everyone and everything
Now more than ever .. it pays to have a structured approach to your Cybersecurity Career and not just do cert after cert thinking you are moving ahead
Here are a few key things I would recommend you focus on
Note: As always this is 100% my subjective opinion to be taken or thrown away as you see fit
1 — Benchmark yourself against the industry
How will you grow your skills in 2024 ?
Here is my advice
1 — Find your dream job on LinkedIn
2 — Do a gap assessment against it i.e. benchmark your CV and find out what skills or certs you are missing
3 — Use that to form your 12 month roadmap for 2024. This will help you formulate a clear career goal you are working towards instead of just googling the “10 hottest certs for 2024”
Make sure to give yourself a stretch goal that takes you out of your comfort zone
For example building an application on the cloud or creating a machine learning model based around Cybersecurity
2 — Be Careful about Job Switching
We managed to dodge a recession in 2023 despite all the doom and gloom that was mentioned
However we are still not out of the woods yet !
Be careful when changing jobs even in a hot field like cybersecurity
Change jobs for a good reason and not just for a minor pay raise or because you want a new job title
If the job does not work out you might face serious difficulty finding another cybersecurity job
Cybersecurity jobs are there but the job market is quite saturated with people who were let go
This does not mean you cannot increase your salary or monetize your cybersecurity skills as I wrote about recently
3 — Create a Career Continuity Plan
Do you have a continuity plan for your career ?
What if you do get impacted by layoffs ? Do you have step by step plan in place ?
Just like we create disaster recovery plans for companies .. make sure you have one if you get hit by layoffs
Posting on LinkedIn and putting the “Open to Work” Icon on LinkedIn might not be enough
This year .. make sure you take the steps I have outlined below
4 — Build something using AI
For most people learning about AI means reading about it passively
Do not be one of those people
Make 2024 the year you actually build something using AI
Create an API wrapper for something like ChatGPT around Cybersecurity services
or create a CustomGPT and use it for a specific Cybersecurity use case
Either way .. use this year to build instead of being a passive consumer of AI !
5 — Be Smart about Certifications
Certifications are wonderful and all but ..
Please do not think doing a cert means you have achieved a milestone
Those days are gone
There are millions of certified people in Cybersecurity who have been laid off or looking for jobs right now
Get Certified but take that as a starting point and not the end goal
Develop your skills and brand instead of becoming a certification factory
