InfoSec career

JasminLandry

I was wondering, how many years of experience in IT did you have before getting into the security field? It can be any field: pentesting, risk management, compliance, etc. And what certifications did you have back then that you think helped you land that first job?

MSP-IT

I had 9 to 10 months before I got into Identity and Access Management. Hoping to jump into Pen-Testing in the next 4.

the_Grinch

Four years of full time IT experience doing just about everything (server administration, network administration, scripting, help desk, NOC) before I moved into a regulatory and security analyst role.

Khaos1911

A year and a half internship during my junior/senior year of undergrad. No experience, no certs. I just interviewed well and I think the team could see my passion for wanting the position, plus their number 1 candidate decided to go back to India for the summer and I just out interviewed the rest of the competition. After that, moved to my current company and did a SAP helpdesk type role for a few years.

I saw that an infosec job opened up at a fortune 100 company (Same company) and thought I had no shot, but they really coveted my internship experience and the technologies I was exposed to along with being the sole person responsible for preparing all the data and reports for IT audits for 5 different systems and interacting with those internal/external auditors. I was in way over my head, but I pulled it off and always got great reviews.(God, I hated that internship and had all sorts of anxiety/stress about it outside of work, but it gave me so much exposure to different technologies and being solely responsible for all sorts of reporting for the entire IT department, along with my regular duties). I got all my certs between now and May of last year and most of my Infosec duties are being the lead team member on the IPS, SEIM, and internet filtering. I'm on the incident handling team and trying to really get my feet wet in that side of things and I'm starting to dabble in some forensics but not much.

aftereffector

I spent about 3 years as an IT manager before becoming an information assurance manager (mostly focusing on compliance). CISSP was a definite help but I actually got the job while I was still studying for it - I had a few other associate level certifications such as CCNA-RS and Security as well as CASP to check the HR blocks.

SephStorm

8 years professional, Applied and interviewed well, had several security certs already.