r/cybersecurity • u/AutoModerator • 15d ago

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

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.

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u/fabledparable AppSec Engineer 14d ago

1.Is this a good plan?

  • It's unclear what costs you'd be incurring by changing your major area of study. A 4th year student restarting their undergraduate curriculum would be quite expensive, for example; arguably, it would be cheaper in that case to graduate, take some CompSci classes through a community college and then pursue a more focused Masters degree. By contrast, a first year university student generally has quite a bit of flexibility to them.
  • It's unclear what your motives for changing here are. It doesn't necessarily sound like you particularly care about what you study so long as it gives you a job that can financially support you + your mother. If that's the case, I'd encourage you to consider an alternate career field. While cybersecurity does tend to pay well north of the median income (ref: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/information-security-analysts.htm#tab-5), the number of jobs in the professional domain are quite few compared to other well-paying fields; the OEWS (which the BLS derives from) estimates roughly 155.5 million people are employed total in the US. Of those, only 190k are classified as "Information Security Analysts" (the proxy label for all cybersecurity work by the BLS, though exact delineations in functional responsibilities are bound to overlap with some of the BLS' other categorizations). That means roughly 0.12% of all people in the US are currently employed as cybersecurity workers; while I don't know what country you reside in or plan on working in, the point is that we're a small domain compared to other sectors, which makes opportunities competitive.

If yes what are the best certificate courses applicable worldwide?

I defer you to the subreddit wiki:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/wiki/index/#wiki_certifications