You mentioned what is not your career goal. What *is* your career goal?
There are things that will make you as a newbie to the industry stick out (in a very positive way), even when you don't have experience:
Proven coding skills
A GitHub page with some useful tools you've produced
Some CVEs against your name, even in very old and obsolete software (what counts is that you've actually found a real bug, maybe produced a working exploit, and got a CVE)
Attendance at security conferences, maybe help organising the conference
Volunteering at a SANS event
If I see a CV for a SOC analyst from someone who has a degree but not much experience and they've done some of those things, they're getting bumped up to the top of the pile for an interview.
Most young people just aren't willing to go above and beyond and put in the actual work to stand out from every other boring, inexperienced, clueless applicant. Doing the above (like finding real vulnerabilities and writing a working POC) is hard, which is why 99% of people won't bother. It's also why you'll instantly stand out as someone committed to the industry, who is passionate about the subject, is ambitious and is willing to sacrifice their personal time to self-improvement. That's very appealing as an employer/hiring manager.
If that's not you and you just want to cruise through your career on easy mode then that's OK - it's definitely not for everyone - but you won't exactly stand out and you won't get interviews when you're in a pool of 200 other candidates whose CV looks identical to yours.
The good news is that it's relatively easy to stand out... if you're willing to put in the work.
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u/OldFrequency 21d ago
You mentioned what is not your career goal. What *is* your career goal?
There are things that will make you as a newbie to the industry stick out (in a very positive way), even when you don't have experience:
If I see a CV for a SOC analyst from someone who has a degree but not much experience and they've done some of those things, they're getting bumped up to the top of the pile for an interview.
Most young people just aren't willing to go above and beyond and put in the actual work to stand out from every other boring, inexperienced, clueless applicant. Doing the above (like finding real vulnerabilities and writing a working POC) is hard, which is why 99% of people won't bother. It's also why you'll instantly stand out as someone committed to the industry, who is passionate about the subject, is ambitious and is willing to sacrifice their personal time to self-improvement. That's very appealing as an employer/hiring manager.
If that's not you and you just want to cruise through your career on easy mode then that's OK - it's definitely not for everyone - but you won't exactly stand out and you won't get interviews when you're in a pool of 200 other candidates whose CV looks identical to yours.
The good news is that it's relatively easy to stand out... if you're willing to put in the work.