Weeks 7 & 8: Recommendations—Getting Prepared for your SecureSet Journey

CORE Graduate, Kimberly Decker, shares an authentic student perspective of her experience and growth at SecureSet Academy.

In this article, I will give future SecureSet students a few recommendations for how to best get prepared for the program and your imminent job search. As they will remind you at SecureSet: Your goal for the program is to get a job in Cybersecurity. This information should be timely for prospective students looking to start in one of the upcoming cohorts.

Promotion

I strongly recommend creating a detailed, master resume and LinkedIn profile before starting at SecureSet. Why? Because you simply won’t have time to focus on these time-consuming activities while in the program. Of course, you will be tweaking your resume as you apply for jobs, but you don’t want to be starting from scratch.

I would also suggest taking the Resume seminar at your local county Workforce Center (I went to Arapahoe Douglas Works!) before starting your SecureSet program. They provide you with practical information on how to build your master resume and how to target your resume to a specific job posting. I often find these types of seminars to be a waste of time, so I was pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of this seminar. As a side note, these offices are also the places where you will go to apply for funds to help pay for SecureSet tuition or potentially offset certification costs.

Networking

As soon as you become a SecureSet student, join ISSA and take advantage of their student membership. The quality of the speakers brought in for monthly meetings by the Denver chapter and the Women in Security (WIS) group is exceptional, and there are excellent networking opportunities at the WIS meetup. It is generally challenging to attend a meetup for the first time. In addition, it can be rather intimidating for a woman to make new connections in male-dominated groups. The Women in Security group is very welcoming and approachable — for both women and men — and it’s nice to be able to relax when networking on occasion!

You can attend your first ISSA meeting for free, but subsequent meetings cost $25 for non-members. ISSA also holds monthly “happy hour” meetups which sometimes provide an opportunity to meet hiring managers of different organizations.

Technical Recommendations

Everyone that attends SecureSet has a different background and and a different set of technical skills. Regardless, I feel that your confidence will be boosted if your first week goes smoothly from a technical perspective. So, here’s some advice to ensure that happens.

First, check with SecureSet a few weeks in advance of your start date regarding the minimum specifications for your laptop. It’s much less stressful if you have the necessary equipment from Day 1, rather than desperately trying to find a suitable machine on Amazon during the first week!

In addition, have Virtual Box installed along with 1 or 2 virtual machines (VMs) running Ubuntu and 1 VM running Kali Linux. Spend a little time getting familiar with virtual environments. You will complete these activities in the first week of class but having some experience working in these environments really helps to reduce the stress of the first week.

Feel free to contact me with more specific questions. And fellow current and former students, please comment with your personal recommendations.

To be continued …

About the Author

Kimberly Decker graduated from the SecureSet CORE immersive as part of the Spring 2018 cohort. Before her time at the academy, Kimberly earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Colorado. Kimberly spent years conducting scientific research, as well as working in the software industry. Kimberly has seen several job opportunities come her way since graduating from the Academy, currently working as a security program coordinator at Ping Identity, in Denver Colorado.

If you’re interested in starting a career in cybersecurity, our CORE, HUNT and PATH immersives can get you there in less than a year. Visit secureset.com to learn more about our cybersecurity workshops, immersive programs and free cyber events.

Did you miss the beginning of this series? Catch up on Kimberly’s story here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Weeks 5–6