Master's Degree and INFOSEC Career Advice

RPMar52

Good afternoon all,

I'm new to the forums and new to the IT world. I'm more computer literate than your average user...been using/modifying/fixing minor issues for friends and family for about 15 years, but I have no true IT employment-level experience.

Looking to start a career in INFOSEC/Information Assurance/Cybersecurity. Just got A+ certified and I'm studying for the Network+ and then Security+. I'm hoping these will get me an IT job where I can start learning and gain experience..I realize experience trumps degrees and certifications, but that all three are necessary.

I'm thinking that a systems admin or junior network admin role would be a good goal to shoot for having these certifications. Any input or correction on that assumption would be welcomed.

I have a liberal arts bachelor's degree and qualify for the new GI Bill, which will pay for all or most of graduate school. Any recommendations for schools and or programs? Advantages to brick and mortar vs. online since cost isn't the primary consideration? I've been looking at MS in IT with concentrations in IA or Cybersecurity. Anyone have any experience with those programs? Are they worth the money in terms of knowledge gained and jobs opened?

Thanks in advance for any advice and mentorship you can provide!

phantasm

Any type of admin position will be hard pressed to obtain without experience. Unfortunately, you'll need to start out on either the helpdesk or in a NOC environment. These jobs entail endless hours of answering phones and creating tickets and doing basic troubleshooting. After a few years of experience there you can look to move on.

A Net+, Sec+, and A= will help you out in landing the helpdesk job. If you want to move into systems later on then you should look at the MCITP:SA/EA certifications. If security is truly your end goal then I would also suggest a CCNA and CCNA Security plus a CISSP at some point down the road (you'll need 5yrs of endorsed experience to have a full CISSP).

As for B&M vs. online schools, do a search on this forum. We've beat that horse to death so many times that PETA has this place on their watch list.

Best of luck, welcome to the forum and thank you for serving.

dynamik

This thread might be a good starting point: http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/57208-online-master-degrees-infosec-b-m-list.html

You're definitely going to have to start off as a systems or network admin.

ryoder

Get on the job experience quick, take a low paying job doing as high level work as you can get. Don't take a high paying job doing simple stuff like help desk. Not knocking help desk but you want to get access to operating systems, mail servers, web logic,iis, active directory, switches, unix boxes, nfs mounts, apache servers, ltms, firewalls,routers etc. All the stuff that keeps an organization running. Don't forget that uptime and availability trump security in most companies. If you need to start at a computer store then that's ok for a while too but make sure you are doing what is relevant at a corporate job.
I started down the networking track and ended up on the software development side so be open.

Also, learn how to manage web logic servers, apache servers and how to get around on a Linux box. There are many jobs maintaining a stack like that. Learn how to build a hello world java web app, war file, to web logic. Now update the app to do a simple db query and use a web logic db conn pool for access to a custom mysql db. Then load balance the app in a cluster. This is what the webadmins at my biz do on a daily basis.

RPMar52

Thanks for the advice! I appreciate it.