Jumping back to people who are entry-level and want to get in and have the passion and
have the problem solving skill, but don't have a lot on their resume to show for it
yet, what are – are there some ways that they can pop their resume in that way to show
you that they have that type of analytical brain? Or because, obviously like you said,
the actual cheap skin or whatever, doesn't matter as much. How do you look at an entry-level
resume and say, “Oh, yeah. This person seems to be really passionate.” Is it in the cover
letter? Is it in the way they talk about their past experiences?
Yeah. I mean, certainly the way they present themselves when we're doing an interview.
Then if that passion, or spark in their eye comes through for this type of work. I’d
say commonly, I mean, this is – everybody's different, but what I’ve seen in a lot of
great junior candidates is some way that they've explored their interest in their academic
career. For example, a lot of universities have clubs, where they have a digital forensic,
or incident response club, where they do capture the flag exercises, or they're doing some
of the things out there. I interviewed a candidate not too long ago, where I think he had built
a network at his house. They're just showing an interest in diving into this, even on their
free time.
That they’re in the game.
Exactly.
Get some skin in the game. Okay. To jump from that, if you're maybe far from a large tech
center, or you're not – where you want to you start doing this type of work, say you're
in a different industry altogether, are there ways to get experience you need? You mentioned
colleges and capture the flags and stuff, but are there – if you're in another part
of the country, or you're not near a tech center, you're caring for ailing parents or
whatever, are there other ways that you can document your potential employers that you're
in this?
Yeah. I think, especially in the times of COVID right now, we're in an unprecedented
environment of online learning, being just such a – as good as it's ever been. I mentioned
Champlain College. I think they've got a great online program. Even those that aren't fully
accredited universities, I’m sure – and I’m not up to speed on what all of them
are. There are certainly numerous online courses, as short as an hour, up to the full college
type thing that someone could dive into.
In fact, one of my colleagues at Crypsis, when we hire – He's been a colleague for
a long time now, but when we hired him, he was making a career transition. He had been
in it in IT and worked his way up, but realized where his real passion was was in digital
forensics and incident response and cyber. On his own time, he took it on himself to
enroll in some SANS courses and to just push his own knowledge in that direction. When
we interviewed him, while he had no practical experience in DF or IR, he was coming to us
with this demonstrated passion and his own initiative to learn these things. We gave
him a shot and he very quickly became one of the best assets we had.
New episodes of Cyber Work are available every Monday at 1pm central, and forget to claim
your free month of Infosec Skills! Sign up using the code 'cyberwork' and you'll get
unlimited access to hundreds of courses, hands-on labs, certification practice exams, skills
assessments and more. Use code 'cyberwork' for Infosec Skills!