As part of the What Can I Do series, I have been advocating for you to take inventory of your KSAs (Knowledge, Skills and Abilities) and tasks as they apply to your existing areas of expertise and use them to find areas within Cyber that you have existing experience. The NIST SP 800-181 framework was designed to help define the tasks and knowledge areas that are needed for the cyber security professionals in the workforce. If you’re considering doing a career change or focusing your efforts in school to get a career in Cyber, start with what you know and expand from there. The What Can I Do posts are meant to show roles in cyber security that you can take your existing KSAs to show your experience doing the work. Documenting your areas of experience are only one part of your killer interview, the other is showing areas that you have been working on that may not be demonstrated in your existing work experience. My recent inventory and my goals for world domination showed that for the types of jobs that I plan on claiming, I needed to expand my KSAs. For me, while I have experience in technology, information assurance, development, risk assessment, and project management I need to expand my experience in other areas. To game-plan those areas I developed a list of 10 things I wanted to work on to help increase my KSA. Enter the World Domination Plan (Dramatic music plays in the background). My world domination plan includes 10 areas that I want to expand my breath of knowledge and gain practical experience. Those areas (for me) are Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Linux (refresher), Certified Ethical Hacking, Python (Scripting languages), Git, Networking, Web Development, APIs, and a Java Refresher. I set up reminders on my calendar on a rotating 10 day schedule where each day I work on one of those 10 items. My goal, is to document practical experience, a portfolio if you will, of the areas I have gained experience outside of my existing role. What does that even mean??? So today was python day 050. Today I’ve been reading my Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming pdf book on my kindle (from a past Python related Humble Bundle) and working on implementing a game I like to play in Python. I like variation in my learning platforms so I’ve got a lot of different resources I use to supplement my Python learning including Codecademy (free trial and then student discounted monthly or annual price… I caught a deal for 119 for a year), ITPro.tv, Python bootcamp on Udemy, Python ethical hacking (another humble bundle gem), and Python for networking engineers (humble bundle). I set up an account on Github and my code is available as I’m working on it. As I take on additional python projects (my next one is to come up with a program to figure out how much I spend on GrubHub a year) my Github account will show my mastery of the python language, my ability to document my code (don’t look for that on my game right now), and my ability to tie in multiple technologies (programming, Git, APIs, VisualStudio for Coding). My plan is to share with you my plan for each of my 10 areas so that you can get ideas for how you can supplement your work experience and show you have more skills than you’ve learned at your job(s).
