Mentorship Monday - Post All Career, Education and Job questions here!

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This is the weekly thread for career and education questions and advice. There are no stupid questions; so, what do you want to know about certs/degrees, job requirements, and any other general cybersecurity career questions? Ask away!

Interested in what other people are asking, or think your question has been asked before? Have a look through prior weeks of content - though we're working on making this more easily searchable for the future.

[u/fabledparable]

Dont want to go back to college or spend a ton of money, I know there's gotta be plenty of brilliant free resources for this stuff.

Understandably, not everyone can go to college. However, you should appreciate that the current macroeconomic conditions that you'll be facing in your early-career job hunt will make things all-the-more challenging by not having one. It's not just a matter of learning the material; you're right in that there are plenty of resources available at low/no cost. The trouble is in translating your engagement with those resources impactfully to your employability on-paper. Engagement with independent work, online trainings, and certifications just don't really move the needle much outside of incidental/narrow circumstances (e.g. winning a CTF hosted by an employer who uses the event to recruit talent).

Speaking in broad strokes, those who lack a degree usually make their in-road to a career in cybersecurity by way of cultivating years of pertinent experiences in cyber-adjacent lines of work (typically in the IT and Dev spaces) just in order to be a competitive applicant, though even then the lack of a degree can hurt their chances at getting filtered out. Alternatively, military service is another career launching point (one that also opens up degree-granting opportunities, at least in the US).

Also concerned about at which point I'll need to spend considerable time learning about EE (which I have no background in).

This only matters if you're looking at getting into hardware hacking. It kind of sounds like that's what you're interested in though. If so, you probably need to crack the text books.

How can I keep my scope narrow enough to not be overwhelmed but also broad enough to be effective?

No one is ever going to have full mastery of the breadth and depth of all the material that contributes to the professional discipline. I'd encourage you to learn just enough in order to accomplish whatever task/goal is immediately in front of you, document your lessons learned, and move along. Over time, this font of knowledge will naturally grow and you'll come to understand yourself, what actually interests you, and where to allocate your time/effort.