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Cybersecurity is no doubt a great choice for a career in the 21st-century but let’s be honest, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Deciding which career to pursue when you are a student can be one of the most challenging and daunting tasks ever. This article aims to provide you with some helpful guidance on your journey to decide whether or not cybersecurity is the right career for you.
Let’s start with the basics. Cybersecurity is the practice of safeguarding digital assets like networks, systems and data from cyber incidents and cyber-attacks. Knowing if this is the correct profession for you is definitely not going to be an easy task but if you weigh its pros and cons and ask the right questions then you will surely get the correct answer you are looking for.
Questions to think about when considering a cybersecurity career
Below are presented some of the very important questions that you need to ask yourself before you decide to deep dive into this promising career.
- Do you deal well with change?
If you deal well with change then you don’t need to worry about anything inside cybersecurity. Being a dynamic field that changes every day along with the new innovations in the technology world, cybersecurity will never keep you bored or unmotivated. You will always have to deal with new challenges and new techniques to beat hackers or at least keep them at bay. If you don’t like following industry news and learning new languages to keep up with the current, then you should probably think twice before choosing this career.
- Are you keen to learn regularly?
If you think that getting your CEH V11 certificate is more than enough education to establish yourself as an ethical hacker, then you are wrong. With time, you will not just have to upgrade your skills (if you want to grow in your career) but will also need to learn new tools and coding languages for your work. If you don’t think that’s something you can do on a regular basis, then think again.
- Do you like to do meaningful work?
This is kind of a rhetorical question but bear with it. If you are someone who puts a lot of store in deriving pleasure from your work by ensuring that you are making a real difference in the world, then you will be thrilled to work in cybersecurity. Digital safety is a big and noble responsibility and saves millions of lives every year. From saving companies their hard-earned money to helping someone dodge a sexual offender on the internet, to keeping someone’s pacemaker safe and secure, you will be doing work that will make you proud every single day of your professional life.
- Do you like a well paying job?
Who doesn’t like a well-paying job, right? No one likes to be broke and out of a job. So, unless you like to live life on the edge, you can be assured that a career in cybersecurity is your best bet to financial security and job stability. - Do you like technical things?
How much do you enjoy technical things? If you are someone with a technical aptitude, then cybersecurity is the perfect career for you. All the sub-disciplines of this field have a variety of technical flavour to it. Varying from intense to subtle, to a mix of creativity and technicality, you will find everything in this field to keep you excited at all times.
If your answer to the above questions is mostly yes then you can consider yourself getting a green flag for your decision to pursue cybersecurity. Once you have decided to pursue it, your next step would be to research which course to enrol in and which institutions to join for your ethical hacking training or your computer forensics training or whatever it is that you end up deciding to specialise in.
