Certification Pivot (Goodbye CCNA, Hello Security +)

At the start of this website, I was planning on taking my CCNA within the next year or so. There were a couple of good reasons for this. The first being that I felt it was one of my weaker points in the wider scope of the IT world. I was comfortable with a good number of IT basics, but networking was always a little confusing to me and I wanted to be a more well rounded IT professional. The second reason for the CCNA was that I was coming off the high of getting my first cert, and I wanted to do a more challenging certification than another CompTIA cert, no offense to them but I had heard from multiple sources that their certs aren’t as tough as others. I’d heard the CCNA was a beast and I, in my pride, probably bit off a little more than I could chew. I think this is especially true considering that I don’t work in Networking very often (sysadmins for the win). And so, with this post, I officially am declaring that I’m shelving (not abandoning) the CCNA, and going for the CompTIA Security + exam.

I chose this cert due to what I believe will be a quick turnaround in terms of studying and taking the exam, the fact that this exam demonstrates to employers that security is where I want to be, and finally because I love learning about information security! Heck I posted 30 times in December about it! I also just built out my own Active Directory environment in my home lab to do some pen testing on (post coming soon). My homelab has been quite the project in and of itself to learn about security.

My journey into IT really started about 4 years ago, and at the beginning of it all I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a software developer or a cybersecurity professional (ideally penetration tester), but it’s become clear to me over time that my interest is in information security, and the fact that I’ll be studying what I love will make it all the more fun and easier to study. You can expect a more in depth post on my study resources for the Security + (hint: I’m a big fan of Professor Messer and his stuff).

I want to leave this post with a quick reflection on my time that spent studying for the CCNA. It wasn’t super long to be honest. Life got in the way multiple times and I wasn’t ever fully invested in it. All that being said, I definitely don’t consider it time wasted. I learned a lot about networking in that time. From cabling mediums and speeds, to playing around with a Cisco CLI, to learning about VLANs and VPNs. It’s all helped me in my homelab environment. Because of my CCNA studying I learned about the importance of utilizing VLANs to segment your network, and I setup a DMZ for anything I expose to the internet and setup some firewall rules so traffic can’t flow from that DMZ into my home network. I learned about DNS and setup pihole on my home network, much to the chagrin of my wife, who enjoys personalized ads, and I better understand the satisfying sound of an Ethernet cable being plugged in.