This is my first blog post of hopefully many.
I plan to keep a log of my journey starting in the cybersecurity field and also the training and courses that I am doing.
My aim is that I will be qualified and have a range of knowledge to progress my career in the next few years.
Currently, I have been working in the same business for five years now and have gained a large range of knowledge and skills from them and my fellow employees.
To give you a little bit of my work background, I started out as an IT apprentice doing a Level 3 in IT, Telecoms, and Digital Communications. Alongside this apprenticeship, I was working on our dedicated helpdesk team to support our hundreds of software customers. The skills that I have learned from working on the helpdesk were communication skills, procedural skills and knowing what support is covered and what needs escalating, skills in managing the ticketing system and ensuring that all cases are updated correctly and that we meet our SLA targets.
I quickly moved up our helpdesk ladder to second-line support in the first few months and was now managing more administration of our ticketing system. I also branched out to start managing the internal IT for the business. This was due to the departure of our IT administrator.
I completed my Level 3 apprenticeship after 12 months and then moved onto Level 4 in Network Engineering. The decision to move onto a new apprenticeship was because I always want to be learning and this would also give me the necessary skills to take over the entire IT network and solely manage this.
Throughout this apprenticeship, I gained the core fundamentals of networking and how network nodes all join together. This opened up my eyes to the different career paths in IT and gave me an idea of where I wanted to go.
This was then changed by my introduction to the cybersecurity universe… After finishing my Level 4 Network Engineer apprenticeship, my company approached me and wondered if I wanted to undertake another apprenticeship, a Level 4 in Cyber Security.
At first, I did not want to take on another apprenticeship and just wanted to work for a bit without any coursework, but after a day of thinking, I decided that this could be a new fun venture for me. At this point, I was managing the internal network for my company and managing our customer-hosted servers, alongside being the escalation point for our helpdesk and implementation team.
I am now currently 80% of the way through my cybersecurity apprenticeship with the view to finish this in the upcoming months.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, I will look to log as much of my cybersecurity journey as possible, and hopefully, you will hear a lot more from me.
Thank you for reading, and I hope to speak to you soon.