Personal Branding Got Me $2,000/Day in Security | EP 18

Build your dream career in cyber security by mastering personal branding.

In this episode of Cyber Security Diaries, Nathan from Station X talks with personal branding expert Ken Underhill—author, mentor, and guide to thousands of successful professionals—about leveraging personal branding to stand out in a competitive job market.

Discover why personal branding is often the most overlooked career accelerator, and learn exactly how to build authority, showcase your skills, and attract top-tier job opportunities. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to advance, these insights will help you navigate your cyber security journey with confidence.

Stay until the end to learn how to access the Cyber Security Career Mega Pack, packed with certification guides, role roadmaps, and tools to match you to your ideal cyber security job. Transform your career prospects and outshine the competition.

Highlights:

• How personal branding can accelerate your cyber security career

• Choosing your niche and focusing your brand on a single role

• Leveraging LinkedIn to get noticed by hiring managers

• Proven strategies for showcasing hands-on skills and expertise

• Why giving value to the community creates new opportunities

• Accessing free resources to map out your cyber security journey

00:00 Introduction to Personal Branding in Cybersecurity

01:24 Meet Ken Underhill: Personal Branding Master

02:25 Understanding Personal Branding

03:48 Building Your Personal Brand in Cybersecurity

06:36 Choosing Your Cybersecurity Path

10:04 Leveraging Social Media for Personal Branding

16:34 Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile

30:43 Understanding Gap Analysis

31:21 The Importance of Personal Branding

32:12 The Hustle Mentality in Cybersecurity

32:52 Misconceptions About Cybersecurity Careers

36:31 Feeder Roles and Transition Jobs

41:29 The Power of Personal Branding

49:48 The Law of Reciprocity

55:36 Book Recommendations and Final Thoughts

58:46 Understanding the Business Mindset

59:02 Sharing Resources and Secrets

59:34 The Importance of Real-Life Experience

01:00:06 Free Resources for Learning

01:00:38 Effort and Hustle in Job Preparation

01:00:46 Mock Interviews and Feedback

01:01:40 The Reality of Hustle

01:03:04 Freelancing and Cybersecurity

01:06:00 Consistency in Personal Branding

01:07:28 Interview Tips and Transition Roles

01:10:22 Alternative Career Paths

01:17:28 Final Takeaways and Encouragement

01:25:22 Conclusion and Resources

RESOURCES & LINKS:

CYBER SECURITY CAREER MEGA PACK

https://www.stationx.net/mega/

STATIONX MEMBERSHIP

https://www.stationx.net/join

CYBER SECURITY CERTIFICATION MATCHMAKER

https://www.stationx.net/certification-matchmaker/

CYBER SECURITY CAREER MATCHMAKER

https://www.stationx.net/cyber-security-career-matchmaker/

SHOW NOTES & DOWNLOADS

https://www.stationx.net/podcast/personal-branding-cyber-security/

CONNECT WITH NATHAN HOUSE ON LINKEDIN

https://www.linkedin.com/in/housenathan/

CONNECT WITH KEN UNDERHILL ON LINKEDIN

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenunderhill/

SUBSCRIBE FOR IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS, EXPERT CAREER ADVICE, AND INSIDER TIPS. LIKE AND SHARE TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL. YOUR FEEDBACK HELPS US CONTINUE DELIVERING VALUABLE CONTENT!

#CyberSecurity #AI #Privacy #EthicalHacking #PenTesting #CloudComputing #Programming #Coding #TechCareers #CyberSecurityTraining #DataPrivacy #Infosec #CloudSecurity #DevSecOps #Malware

Transcript

Personal Branding Got Me $2,000/Day in Security 

 Do you want to land your dream job in cybersecurity and outshine the hundreds of other candidates? I'm Nathan from Station X and in this episode of Cybersecurity Diaries, I'm revealing the most Overlook career accelerator in our industry, personal branding. I brought in personal branding master, Ken Underhill, who's helped thousands of cybersecurity professionals land roles in fortune 500 companies together.

We'll break down the exact strategies. The transform complete beginners into sought after cyber security experts. This isn't just theory. We recorded this conversation live with hundreds where Ken shares real examples and practical steps you can implement today. You'll learn how to build authority in the field, get noticed by top employers and create opportunities that most candidates never see.

So stay until the end and I'll give you. The free access to the cyber security career mega pack, your complete blueprint for breaking into the industry. And we're talking about certification guides, role specific roadmaps, skills, assessments, and even tools to match you with your perfect cyber security role.

Smash that subscribe button and let's transform your cyber security career.  Here's the podcast recording. So I'm super delighted. To have Ken Underhill joining us for this live podcast. Ken was a co founder of CyberLife. It's an organization that's dedicated to cyber security education for professionals and organizations as well.

He's one of the authors of the international bestselling book, Hack the Cybersecurity Interview, which is a must read. I'll give you a link to that if you're interested. And you've also won. Multiple awards, and you've educated thousands of people, or perhaps more than that, through online courses, which are available at station X.

And you cover topics like personal branding, mastering interview skills, landing the right job. And you've also featured on like Forbes, Fox, NBC, and others. So you've obviously helped countless professionals. And so I'm super excited to have. Ken Withers here today and obviously really appreciate you being here.

How was that? Was that about right? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for, uh, thanks for having me, Nathan, and welcome everyone. Yeah. So as Nathan mentioned, former on Cyberlife, I did that last year. So why don't we start off with, I think you're probably saying, what is personal branding? Let's start off with that. Obviously people are here because they've seen the title personal branding.

I think actually. A lot of people don't really know what it is. They think branding, they think companies. And I actually think a lot of people not that interested in personal manning or they dismiss it a little bit. So let's just start with what is personal branding? What, why should we care about it as people that are in cybersecurity?

Yeah. And I think you gave a good answer there, right? Like company has a brand, you buy some clothes, you go eat at a restaurant. You buy a phone, Android, iPhone, whatever, that company has somehow branded themselves. Basically, they just got visibility in your mind. That might come from a family member saying, Oh, this restaurant's really good.

From an advertisement you see online, it could be a social media post, it could be something on the news, et cetera. There's a lot of ways that a company could reach you. So you say, Ooh, I need a new phone. Let me go buy an iPhone. In the same way, you want to get awareness about you. In a sense, we Get people thinking about you in a certain way.

So for example, if I think of Nike, I think of shoes. If I think of, I think of a phone or if I think of Apple, I think of a phone or a tablet or whatever. So they branded themselves a certain way, but I think of McDonald's. I think of doing us food. That's going to kill me, but I think of cheeseburgers and things like that.

So there, there's all these companies, they've got what Nathan said is a brand. And in the same way, you have your own personal brand. Now, what does that mean in the context of your cybersecurity? That means that you want to be known. Any specific area, for example, if your goal or whoever on this call, if your goal is to be a penetration tester, that's career that you want, then your branding should be all around that.

You shouldn't be posting about sock analyst related stuff. And we thought for the most part, you should be focused on just pen test. If you want to be a SoC analyst, a cybersecurity analyst, or if you want to work in GRC or be auditing, whatever the initial path you want to do is, or for those that are already working in cyber, if you want a career change into something else, everything should be around, right?

Now you may ask this question. So maybe jumping ahead here, Nathan, but oftentimes new people or people trying to get their first job in cybersecurity are like, I have nothing to share. I don't know anything. I'm just learning. Um, I'm not an expert. I can tell you right now, I don't call myself an expert.

I've been doing this for a couple of decades now. I really don't think anyone's an expert because TTPs or tactics, techniques, procedures are always changing. Threat actors trying new things, technology's evolving. I don't, I really don't think anyone out there is an expert. We just try to do the best that we can.

For someone brand new, you just are going to basically document your journey, right? That's what your branding would be, right? Let's say you want to be a pen tester. You're learning on TryHackMe or HackTheBox or Station X or whatever you're posting on social media. It's all about that, but it's your journey.

Hey, I learned this new thing. Hey, look at me doing this. Here's how you set up something as simple as VirtualBox. And here's how you set up some VMs in VirtualBox. You'd be surprised at how many people can't. What you're doing with that, in addition to putting yourself out there, you're also showing the hire manager, like myself, that you're someone I can bring on the team that can train others.

Because I can really, I can train anyone on anything, right? I can pay for you to go through training. I can pay for you to go to station X and take every course they have. But I can't train you on ambition. I can't train you to have the hustle. And so what the personal branding does is it really shows me as a hirer manager that, okay, you're taking that initiative and you're able to show me that you do some things and that you're able to make contributions to the industry.

And really personal branding is not just someone trying to get in. It's same with someone experienced, someone that's an executive level. You're really just trying to showcase who you are and what you want to be known for essentially. I know that was a very long winded answer to your question, Nathan, but hopefully that covers up what my personal brand is and why it's important.

Do you know what I found interesting is you mentioned that everything should be about the role. And I think that really needs to be hammered home, not just for personal branding, but for your brand. Education for your getting into cyber security, for your skills, for your certifications. It should be about the role you're going into.

It's totally different. If you're going to be an auditor versus a pen tester versus a chief information security officer. And it, and it obviously just spreads. through to your personal branding, clearly, because that's what you're representing  yourself as. So I think if for anyone that's not, for anyone that's not really sure where they're going in cybersecurity in terms of role, at a certain point, you have to know at the beginning, you've got to get all your foundational stuff down.

But at a certain point, if no wind is favorable, if you don't know what port you're sailing towards. Yeah. So. A hundred percent true. And I think when we talk about challenges with personal branding, the number one challenge is people don't know what they want to do. You'll go on LinkedIn, you'll see someone's profile and it says cybersecurity analyst, SOC analyst, pen tester, threat hunter, threat intel, GRC.

I'm like, what do you want to do? Pick one, right? And I know it's extremely difficult when you're, especially when you're brand new, everything seems cool, right? Everything's cool. I'm like, Oh, but the reality is you have to pick one. And if that means that you pick your top three and then you flip a coin or something, and then you get down to two and then you, you know, slip a coin again and you, okay, here it is, so be it.

Understand that you can always change. At some point, right? And another thing that might help you try to figure out what you want to do is look at the actual Job market. What I see, especially here in the U S a lot of people, because hacking is so cool. Everyone wants to be a pen tester, right? But the reality is there are not that many jobs on the offensive side of security.

They're just on, especially without a security clearance to do government work. So look at the job market, wherever you are in the world and be realistic. Okay. I want to be a penetration tester, but everything I'm seeing open right now is for IT auditing or cybersecurity auditor or whatever. Okay. Okay. I know that I probably need to start in that career first, get my first job, then that'll open up more opportunities, I'd say.

Keep growing like a winner. But the biggest challenge I see on social media, especially for people that like reach out to me, Hey, I need help trying to, I'm trying to find a job. They don't know what they want to do. Now, the problem with that, besides the training stuff Nathan mentioned, the other problem with that is, is if someone reaches out to me and says, Hey, I'm looking for a good stock analyst and I'm looking for someone that we can, we can train up someone that's ambitious, et cetera, right.

If I look at your profile and I see six different cybersecurity jobs you're listing there that you want to do, I don't know what you want to do, right? I really don't. I don't know which one is the priority there. Now, if someone else, That I've interacted with, Hey, I want to be a sock analyst and everything they're posting about a sock analyst and everything they're learning is to become a better sock analyst.

Then I'm probably going to, let's say Nathan's the one with a job. I'll say, Hey, Nathan, check out this person here. They're learning a lot. They're posting, trying to help others, et cetera, all around sock analysts. So that's, it's not that Nathan and I are trying to be jerks. So we've got to pick one thing.

It's the reality is nobody can help you get a job if they don't know what you want to do. That's just the reality of how it works. Same thing, if you apply for jobs and you are applying for cybersecurity analyst roles, but your profile is everything around GRC, when a recruiter or HR person comes there, they're going to be a little confused.

So you don't want any confusion at all on what it is that you want to do. And again, I know where you're starting out, it's very difficult, usually, to figure out exactly one path. But if that means you need to flip a coin or use one of those generators online, or even ask AI, what should I do theoretically?

Which one of these should I pick? Can you randomly choose or something? So be it. But I really would start, honestly, I would start with a job market where you are. Like what's realistic for you to get, and that really should determine what you want to start with. Of course, everyone wants to make six figures, all that good stuff.

But you often have, lots of times have to start someplace. Yeah, absolutely. So a few tips for people that are on station X and you. Guys probably know this already. So everybody who has a roadmap, almost everybody will have some sort of section on essentially how to pick your role, because this is so key.

We have a whole stuff for how to do that. Now, one thing that is available for people that aren't on station X is we have the cyber security career matchmaker  pop the link in there. Let me know if you can see that. And that's a tool. Asks you a bunch of questions about your personality and what skills you currently know, don't know.

And then it'll give a suggestion as to the sort of role that you might want to go into. And as Ken alluded to, if you don't have many skills, then you'll be starting off in junior roles or even what we call feeder roles that feed you in to cybersecurity. And another thing related to what Ken said is that we is a station.

We have a tool to help you do what's called a gap analysis between  And the role that you want to go into. So at StageNext, we have you define what your long term vision and goal is. But there could be roles on the way to that, the milestones and stepping stones to get there. But simply a gap analysis is as John says, you look at the job market and what can you do?

And what can't you do? And how big is the gap? And then how long is it going to take to fill that gap? And that can help you decide on what's going to be that first role versus then the long term vision for what you want to move into. Again, if someone's starting out, you mentioned document your journey.

Hey. Anything else, any other tips for people that are just starting out with their personal branding  or starting out in cybersecurity? I would say, so just recap for those maybe join in a little later, picking one thing you want, which career you actually want. The other thing I'll say is that do whatever medium works best for you, right?

For example, if you're more comfortable just screen recording, not being on camera, but showing like how to set something up or do some kind of hands on thing, great. If you're a writer and you prefer to write on a post or write an article or something, great. If you just prefer audio or pictures or whatever, whatever way is more comfortable for you.

I am only horrible using Canva as an artist.  It looks horrible when I do it. So I don't normally do that because I know that's not a strength thing. Uh, for me, I don't always like being on camera. I'm totally an introvert. I know some people are like, that's crazy. You're always on podcasts and stuff, but I'm really an introvert.

That's true. You are. I know. But so for me, I'm really good at like scream recording and talking you through how to do something like that's new, right? I don't consider myself a writer. I can write posts and stuff. And I do that sometimes, but like, I know my strengths, right? I know the things that I would prefer doing.

And that's how I post that usually, or how I would do that. Whatever medium you're comfortable with, again, you don't have to be on camera and you can use free tools like Loom or used to be called Screencast O Matic. I forget the new name. But that's what I've used for years. And they have a free version.

A lot of them have free version. You don't have to pay any money. I think it's one key thing I want to put across around personal branding, like a LinkedIn account is free. I know we might've been talking about website, but you don't need a website. You can use GitHub or something if they're doing more technical things.

You want to showcase it there. You can do a free YouTube channel when there's a lot of ways, just again, whatever medium is best for you. It might be a podcast where you interview. Other people try to get their first step, but you're getting, you hear from their challenges and maybe you bring on some experienced people, et cetera.

So that's another tip I would have. The other tip I'll say is that leverage what's already out there instead of trying to recreate the wheel. So let me explain that.  Um, a lot of people will tell you, Oh, you need to get a personal website. I'm actually against that. Number one cost, but not everybody has extra money.

I grew up very poor. I didn't have extra money for a website  or anything like that. And I'm against that because it's an extra cost for you, but also Who's realistically going to find your website unless you do a lot of SEO work. Unless you put a lot of work behind it. Nobody's going to find your website.

You might link it on your social media, but otherwise nobody's going to Google search for you. What you could do is say instead, if you want your name to get out there, put a course up on like Udemy, put some videos on YouTube with your name or in the, in the title of the video, along with whatever you're teaching people.

Be on different podcasts, volunteer as a guest to go on podcasts,  even local media. Here in the U S you can get on local media stations pretty easily alongside security stuff. Depending on the time of the year, especially around October with Awareness Month. So leverage the, the places essentially that already have done all that, already spent all the money for advertising and SEO work and all that stuff.

So when someone Googles your name, if you Google my name, you're going to see different things. You might see Cybery. I don't know if they still got me. I think I still have courses on my website, but Udemy. You'll see it there. You'll see YouTube, you'll see different podcasts I've been on, you'll see LinkedIn.

So that's what you're trying to do. Also with the personal branding is leverage those resources that are already there and just get your name there. And that's what like, when you look at some of these people that are, that you maybe look up to in the industry and you're like, wow, they were on, Nathan mentioned earlier, oh, he's on Fox, he's on NBC and Forbes and all that.

That's all that was. He's just reaching out to those places.  contributing to an article or going on their, their news station or whatever, to, to speak about something that was all free. I didn't pay for anything. Right. Even so leverage what's there because then you can get in the top of Google search on page one.

So if I search for your name on page one at Google, I'm like, Oh, wow. This person's on page one of Google. They must know their stuff. Even if you're brand new, I'm going to think there's something. Right. So the other bit of advice here is just leverage what's free out there versus trying to spend a lot of money.

Um, I know some people on social media will tell you, you got to buy this and that, and you need this and that, and you don't need any of that stuff. You don't, you especially don't need somebody who's 10, 000 coaching program where they're promising you that you're going to get a six figure science  In three months or whatever, it's just not realistic for the vast majority of people with no IT experience whatsoever.

So save your money. Like I said, I grew up very poor, but I'm very intelligent with my spending. And I really, you can get a cybersecurity job without really spending any money. You can start up till here. It's just, you gotta have that hustle and be willing to look for those opportunities.  As they come out.

Yeah, absolutely.  Hey there, quick pause. We just checked our analytics and only 7.5% of you watching right now are subscribed. We're aiming to get that up to 20% so we can keep bringing you in depth cybersecurity career content like this. So if you are finding value. In these strategies, hit that subscribe button now.

I really, really appreciate it. It helps us more than you can imagine, and you'll never miss out on our latest career insights and expert interviews. Plus you'll be the first to know when we release new resources, like our free career mega pack. All right, let's get back to the personal branding. So LinkedIn.

Obviously is one of the big ones. What any advice for. How people here should tackle LinkedIn. What should we put on there? Personal brand statements. Are those relevant? Yeah. So, so with LinkedIn, number one, you want to, as best as you can, because again, we've got a broad audience here. So don't feel like you've got to go pay for professional photographs, but as good a photographs as you can get, as far as your profile photo.

Again, it could be with your cell phone, but just try to do, you could get something like I have a spaceship here, but you don't need that. You can just use a blank wall or something like that, but a professional photo. And then as we talked about earlier, picking one thing, right? When I look at your headline.

It should be something either a stock analyst or I'm looking for stock analyst jobs, whatever it is. It could be that I help companies do this thing. I help companies reduce whatever the headline you want to put there is, but it needs to be clearly one. The about section, and we'll probably run over if I try to dig real deep into LinkedIn, but the about section should just, again, talk about some of the key skills you have, what you can do for an organization.

It's really just a sales page is what you're LinkedIn is. You're trying to sell the employer on why they should reach out to you. It's really just. Key thing here on the experience of your LinkedIn profile, that should exactly match your resume or a CV, depending on what country you're in. You might call it a different thing, but your experience in most places should match up exactly.

If I look at your resume, the first thing I'm going to do, at least me personally, is I'm going to go look for you on LinkedIn. If I see any discrepancies, I'm going to ask myself, like, why, why is there a difference? What, why are they, what are they trying to hide between the two things? Right? So make sure those match up exactly.

Even if you were only at a job a few months, you got laid off or something, put that on there and mention the reason why, you know, Hey, I got, I got laid off or whatever your case might be, right? That's totally fine to do. Most of the key things, right? Your headline, the about section, making sure you have a professional photo.

But the biggest thing that I see people making the mistake on is that they don't pick one thing. They have all these different job titles listed in the profile and it makes it confusing. If I can look at your profile, like I said earlier, And I can see, okay, you want to be a sock analyst if I, and I'll probably keep an eye on your profile.

And if I like what you're doing, how you're giving back to the community by posting, trying to help people. When someone asks me, Hey, someone that we can train up as a sock analyst and say, Hey, check out this person here. And people have literally gotten jobs in the past for me doing that. It doesn't mean I'm gonna do it for everyone on this call, but if you're branding yourself, you're going to find that opportunities come to you.

Versus you constantly have to apply to jobs and never hear back. Yeah. So you, so should everybody really then have a LinkedIn profile, you think? Yeah, a hundred percent. The only time you shouldn't is if you're currently doing a classified government work and they've got, at least here in the US, they've got stipulations of what you can and can't do, and you definitely can't have your photo out there in most cases.

And so those rare situations was probably nobody on this call to be realistic. Those would be where you wouldn't have social media, but everybody else should. There's no reason why you shouldn't, even if you're working a job right now. And you're like, well, if my boss sees my social media, in most cases, unless you're talking bad about the company you work at, they're not going to care.

Unless you're talking about, I'm trying to leave this job. I hate that you go do this, that they're not going to care. Really? Everyone needs one. Again, it's really up to you. Everyone out here, I'm assuming as an adult, you can make your own decisions. The very first thing I do for a candidate that I'm considering bring in for an interview.

Cause I'll look them up on LinkedIn and I'll see what are they posted about? I'm also going to do some Google searching because maybe you've got a Instagram and you're posting a bunch of racist stuff on it and I want to see that in advance. So I can say, Oh yeah, no, this wouldn't be a good, you know, sit for our team, but your social media activity across the board really determines my opinion.

If you're going to get that interview, it doesn't mean you're never going to get an interview if you don't have a LinkedIn, but it's just, it's where the cybersecurity hiring managers are these dudes, they're not, they might have an ex or Twitter, what it used to be called, but the reality is they're on LinkedIn, the conversations happen on LinkedIn, the ability for someone like Nathan or myself or someone else, that's more experienced in the industry to Um, I really, people do check their email.

I don't want to say they don't, but if you email me, if I put my email, you're never going to get a response really, Nathan does, because we've known each other for years, but most people, you're just going to go to spam or whatever. You got filters on my emails. I'm seeing that to see that more experienced people, typically the LinkedIn conversation, it makes it easier on everyone.

I can quickly introduce you to a hire manager, a recruiter, someone that reached out to me and said, Hey, here's the person I was telling you about. And all of a sudden you got a phone call and you get an interview  because you have a LinkedIn. But if you don't have a LinkedIn, I can't do anything. And again, most people don't.

We get all of you on this call probably experiencing. You get so many emails. That's not the way anymore. That's the early 2000s way or monkey mind way of things. LinkedIn's the way these days. So to make this question directly to all of you, my personal opinion, absolutely need to have a LinkedIn unless you've got that rare case of you can't have it because you're pretty stuck.

And. Do you have any specific strategies? So for example, posting, should you post, should you comment, any. Anything there, personal branding? So you want to do everything you can, but there's a caveat. So let me explain. The first thing you need to do is get your profile in order. Cause if you like, let's say you had a business and you had a website and it was really ugly sales page, it didn't work, everything, nothing worked on the website and you kept telling people about the website, people are going to go there and do, I don't want to buy something from this place and they're going to immediately go away and you'll never get them as a customer.

If you think of that mentality of a business owner. You're LinkedIn, you want that profile to be ready as you start doing other things and people come to your profile, they say, okay, Jennifer wants to be a SOC analyst or, you know, I say SOC analyst a lot, it's just a lot of people want to do it. I'll get your profile in order first.

That's the absolute number one thing. Get that profile looking pretty good. And I've got some free videos. If you search my name on YouTube, I've got one or two free videos on LinkedIn profile, but you can, there's other people that have videos out there too, you can look at. But get that in order first.

And then from there, it's more about your time, right? When I say the caveat, how much time do you have to dedicate to this? You don't have to post every day, but what can you post? Can you commit to every Sunday posting something, whether it's a video or a written post or whatever. And then as far as commenting on posts, I know a lot of people do that.

It's gotta be value, right? If you, if I do a post and most of my posts easier to share and free notes for SecPlus and other certs, if you're on there and you're like, Hey, I've also got some notes for the CompTIA A plus exam, there's a link to it. Everybody, if you're studying for that one, that's a valuable comment.

What's not a valuable comment is like commenting for reach. Like a lot of people do. That's there's no value there. You're just wasting your time, right? You're not really getting any more visibility or anything. I mean, here's. You get lost in the millions. So when it comes to commenting on other people's posts, if you find value in the post, you can say, Hey, I find this valuable or whatever.

Stuff like that is cool. But the reality is the more you post, the more you put content out there, the more you volunteer and go on podcasts and stuff, which again are free to do. If anyone's charging me for a podcast, don't do it. But just go on for free to the ones you can. And that's going to get your name out there more.

And you're also going to get what we call cross branding select. For example, if there's so many podcasts out there, but if you go on someone's podcast and they've got a good brand in the industry and you're on their podcast, all of a sudden people look at you like, Oh, who's this person? And that's why I say your profile needs to be in order.

Cause then people are going to go immediately to your profile and learn more about you. And then if they have a role open and they see that you're looking for that type of role, they're probably going to message you and say, Hey, I don't know if you're interested or if you're still looking, but I've got this job open.

I'm the hiring manager. If you're interested in sending your resume all of a sudden, because you wanted a couple of podcasts, you got your profile in order. You've done some posting of your own. All of a sudden where everybody else has taken two, three years to get a job, you just got a, you just got an interview with the hiring manager and they reached out to you and that'll happen in maybe in a couple of months, right?

Or maybe a couple of weeks, even in a few cases, people have been hired in two weeks of doing some of these things. It doesn't happen always, but so when we talk about hosting and stuff on social media, it's, you got to really do what you can be consistent with. And again, depending on where you are in the world, I know internet's sketchy in a lot of countries, power might go out, et cetera.

It really depends on you, your specific situation, but the number one thing of anything is getting your profile in order at first, then you can worry about doing all this other stuff. Yeah, I think my tip would be, even if you're at the beginning and we're talking about sort of documenting your journey is offering value.

So when you're documenting your journey, someone else is seeing what you're doing and then they can, if they're trying to do that thing, it's going to help them replicate the thing. So you're always, you, even though you are selling yourself. You're selling yourself through offering value. And as someone who's hired, obviously lots of security people, um, I'm looking to hire you to solve a problem that I've got.

And the problem is that I need a certain thing to be done. And if I look at your profile and you can do 50 things, you're watered down. And I don't care about 49 of them. I only care about the one that you're trying to solve or that I want you to solve. So that's why the, again, the role aiming towards a particular role is important.

Yeah. So what about other social media platforms? What do you think about X and putting your beat shots on Instagram and things like that? You did mention about how you, you look for potentially negative things online. I think that's all. Pretty much established now, if someone generally in a business will do that, unless they're a startup or something like that, the HR is,  I'm sure that you can probably buy stuff that does it via AI now that HR departments are probably buying, press a button in auto search if someone's posted something dodgy online.

Yeah, I think similar to a business, I make a lot of analogies to business because you are a business. You need to have a mindset that you're a business, you deliver value to the actual business. And especially when you, and it's not this conversation, but when you think of like negotiation of compensation, you are a business, so you need to understand the value you bring to that other business, but if we have that business mindset, a lot of mistakes, smaller businesses make as they try to, they, they hear this term omnipresent, which means you're just everywhere.

They put so much effort trying to beat everywhere that they're nowhere. And so my caution to all of you is pick one platform, get really good, really branded on that platform, then you can worry about other stuff. For example, yeah, you might want to do X and you might want to do, um, what's the other one? A lot of people, Mastodon.

Um, I think people do a lot of streaming on these days. You might want to do Instagram. You might want to do Snapchat. You might want to do YouTube. You might want to do, I don't know why you'd want to do Facebook, but maybe you want to do Facebook and LinkedIn. And I'll pick one. And my recommendation for all of you is pick LinkedIn first, give that an order first, then you can worry about, okay, now I've got LinkedIn, I've got posting there, I want to do more videos and get better reach.

Let me put those on Kirby YouTube channel and do that. But the worst thing you can do is try to be everywhere at once because the reality is hiring managers are on LinkedIn. Yeah, they might have an ex and they might watch YouTube and they might watch Tik TOK, but where they're really focused on business job related stuff is LinkedIn.

So it's fine to have the others, but you've really got to focus. The more you focus and alluding back to. What Nathan and I have been talking about throughout this whole thing of picking one thing. Do the same thing with a social media platform. Pick one thing. The more you focus, the more likely you are to actually get a job a lot faster than people that are trying to spread themselves all over.

And it goes back to, When Nathan was talking about the learning, if you try to learn all the skills to be a SOC analyst, all the skills will be a cyberclick engineer, all the skills to be good at auditing, all the skills will be a penetration tester, all the skills will be a threat hover, threat intel, et cetera.

You're not going to really be good at anything, right? Because. The skills for all those, even at a general level, come from years of working in an actual business, doing a cyber security role, seeing the challenges those other teams have, learning from them, maybe switching your career path throughout your career, etc.

They don't come from watching a bunch of video or doing a bunch of pre camp labs. They're walking through step by step. I think to what Mason said earlier of you've got 50 different skills listed, what are like the top five skills for that particular role? And I had seen in the QA, someone mentioned about the question was about certifications.

Hey, every company's listing a different certification for entry level SOC position. I'm not a fan of certifications. Reality is, In most places, those and callous degrees are a necessary evil because there's gatekeeping, right? They, if you don't have that, they're like, Oh, this person's no good because they don't have security plus or whatever.

My suggestion there instead of looking at the certs they're looking for. What are the skills they're looking for in those different job descriptions? So for example, you could copy and paste all those job descriptions into and just label them like one, two, three, whatever, into a Google doc, download it, throw it in ChatGPT and say, Hey, tell me the top three to five skills that are the hard skills, the technical skills, and then also the top three to five soft skills across that are common across all these jobs, all these job descriptions.

And then ChatGPT or similar, Gemini, whatever you want to use. Can give you an idea of what are they actually looking for those jobs? It's not usually, you know, I'd say gatekeeping. It's not usually the service, not usually the degrees. There's usually certain skills they're looking for that are common across the board for the vast majority of organizations that they need someone to do.

Now, the caveat there, right, a lot of times they don't list these in the job description, right? I actually had someone reach out a couple years ago. Hey, I'm looking for someone for entry level for this job. He sent me the job description. This is at a big telecom provider. And I look at the job description.

Oh, this is a wishlist, right? They had all these things. I'm like, even someone experienced doesn't have all this. Even someone five years experience doesn't need this. So I pitched back to the person. I said, what's the number one technical skill you need them to have? And they're like, I need them to be.

Decent with Linux server administration. That was listed nowhere in the job description. So I'm saying that to say that sometimes you still can't get an idea of what they really want. But for the most part, you can do something like that, where you can prepare a job description and use tools that are available.

Like I can help you with that. So you don't spend tons of hours going through and trying to compare notes and all that, just let it do it for you. That's my suggestion for the person that had that question on, um, certification stuff, I think we've got a lot of questions, some stuff is. I saw someone asking about a VPN that's based on your needs.

You've got to just analyze VPN and place it in your needs. A lot of people use Proton, but, um, your needs are using something like that. APS. And we're not going to be recommending antivirus either. Yeah. Stuff like that we can't cover for you on these types of events.  No. You were, you were supposed to. Yeah.

That, that, that process that Ken was describing within station X terminology, we call that the gap analysis. We have a, a tool for that. But, and I'm actually in that conversation with a few people at Station X. It's pretty much exactly the same. And we've not, we're not even, me and Ken have not even had a conversation about this is, but we, we do exactly the same.

It's you need to figure out what those top five, 10 things are. We call them capabilities. And again, we mentioned the soft skills as well, and the hard skills and where's the gap there, and that's, then that's the gap that you've got to close. And if that gap is too big, then it's going to take you a long time.

And there may be milestone things. That you need to do there. I was just thinking when it comes to personal branding I find a lot of people are pretty slack generally they get the skills If they get the skills, first of all, most people don't get the skills or all the search or anything. They end up quitting, but those that get through, they don't take it seriously, really.

Do they? Or at least in my experience, they don't. Why just, maybe they might do a LinkedIn and they'll do their resume, but they, the way we're talking about it, I think that's quite far away from people's vision of what they should do. But why do you think, why do you think that is? So I think, I think a lot of what you're alluding to there.

And so to just clarify for everyone. What'll happen a lot of times is you might do a little bit of effort, as Nick is saying, like you, you learn some things, you maybe fix your LinkedIn profile a little bit. You post a little bit, but then it's sporadic. And then your favorite shows on Netflix, you're like, let me go.

Let me go watch this. Let me go hang with my friends. But what we're talking about is what a lot of people call like a hustle mentality. Right. And realistically, if we just take a step back on any cybersecurity career, I know a lot of people would tell you entry level cybersecurity career, the reality of traditionally in the past.

Is you would come from what Nathan mentioned earlier, a feeder role, and someone actually mentioned a question in QA  about what types of feeder roles. And so I'll address it here in a second. But traditionally you'd have to come from something else. Many of us came from a kind of a more traditional IT background or something like technical writing, whatever.

And we came into the job from there. I think there's a misconception with, I mentioned the coaching programs that charge you 10, 20 grand or whatever. There's a misconception because of people like that and also the media and also these bootcamps and other programs. I think there's a misconception across the industry that you can do all this in a month or two.

And yes, it does happen. For some people, they get, they get things that fast,  but the reality for those are the hustlers. Yeah. They have a different. Yeah. Yeah. So the vast majority of you that are trying to get a job, I'm just, you may hate me for this. Feel free to hate me. That's totally fine. But I tell you like it is, I'm going to tell you the truth.

I'm not going to sugarcoat stuff, et cetera. The vast majority of people out there trying to get their first time job, it's taken them two to three years. Not everybody, but you know, I'm not saying that the people taking two, three years are not hustlers too. Cause that's. It's not always the case. Some of them are really putting in the work.

Some of it's opportunity. Some of it's where you live. Right. There's so many factors like any other career, but to be good at something, even software development, someone coming out of a bootcamp, they think they know stuff. And I'm going to speak as like a non founder. Like I can do some Python scripting, but like, if you want me to write your next app, I'm not sure yet.

Like there's a lot better people out there than me. I'm going to totally screw it up. And I'm happy to admit that, but like software development takes a long time to get good at all the people that make it look easy. Those are the people that are doing it for years. So in same with a physician, you don't want a doctor that's just spent three months learning something.

A doctor in the U. S. goes through, they do undergrad, they go for four years of medical school, they then do fellowship and residency and all these things after they're done with college to make sure they can do the thing before they're like set free in the world to go work on people. Because you don't want someone like, Oh, which scalpel should I be using again?

You don't want that, right, in the middle of a surgery. So, there's a misconception out there, I think, a lot of times of like, Cybersecurity jobs gonna, oh, I did try hack me. Or I went through certain trainings or whatever and Oh, I got my security plus, where's my job at?  And Nathan, you've gotta be a hustler.

So the way, again, going back to a business mindset, right? If I have a business, can't just sit there and hope that people show up as customers. 'cause then I won't have a business, right? I need to actually go out there, actively be trying to get sales for my business and, and in this case, you are the business.

So you need to be actively what  we call hustling. To get more business, right, to get sales, right, to basically the sales in this case is you getting even just conversations with higher managers, your recruiters, right, just for people in industry, but a more senior level than you've got to have that hustle.

So I think, you know, what we see oftentimes, and again, this is from us helping thousands of people over the years, both of us telling you this stuff of what we've seen the vast majority of people. They'll do it for maybe a month, maybe a couple months. And then if this isn't working, all this other person, they say, I can get it done in three months if I buy their 10, 000 coaching program.

Let me go do that instead. Let me ignore everything that Ken's saying. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Even though he's helped thousands of other people, just let me get a job. I'm going to ignore everything he's saying, and I'm going to go over here to this other guy promised me, promising me this magical solution to my problems.

And I think if you understand that it's a business, you are a business. You have to constantly hustle. I may, I might make being on camera look somewhat easy, especially as an introvert, but I've literally been on video for thousands of hours over the years, so my courses and totally messing up video, like my first course was horrible.

Lighting was bad. I, I was horrible. The mic, I had my, I didn't even have an external mic, so. The audio was horrible, right? All that stuff, right? So now when people see me on a course and they're like, wow, he can just click record and do stuff. Yeah. Well, that was years and years and years of doing it right.

And sailing. And so I think all of you, you've got to have kind of a hustle mentality. Now, real quick, I want to pivot to those feeder roles. As Nathan calls them, I call them a transition jobs. It's basically something to get you to where you want to go. Essentially is what it is. Someone asked about IT and the QA, what types of jobs, he helped us, you can pretty much find a lot of different places.

Sysadmin, oh, perfect. Nathan's sharing screen, right? Network admin, engineer. A lot of us, I started out IT help desk, doing a network administration, network engineering work. Then eventually I got into some stuff I'm doing now, right? There's a lot of those jobs. Some other ones not listed here on station X stuff.

Is if we think outside of it, specifically other feeder roles into a cybersecurity company, it could be things like project management, sales marketing. And if you go on big conference websites, like blackhead USA, you look at their sponsor list and you go look at the smaller sponsor level, like the, uh, the lower tier sponsorship level, look at the companies there.

Those are usually smaller companies. Go look at their websites and see what jobs they have open that you qualify for right now, based on your skills. I think someone in the chat also mentioned, Hey, I'm a mom and I've had other jobs that aren't pertaining to cybersecurity or IT stuff. And people tell me not to listen to my resume or whatever.

Um, that's really specific based on the job you're applying for. There's also real quick, there's also, I know that's outside of personal branding, but there's a, there's the thing about a one page resume. I'm not a fan of that. However, the vast majority of hiring managers, HR recruiters, they're looking for that.

So try to get your resume to one page. If that means cutting off. The fact you've been a mom for 24 years or something, then you may have to do that. I know. So that's person specific, but feeder roles could be a lot of things, right? Traditionally it's the IT roles, right? It's just admin, network engineer, network admin.

Again, Nathan's got them on the screen here for those that can. See the screen, but also things like technical writing, project management, sales, marketing. There's always sales jobs open at companies like, Oh, I've never seen a company that didn't hire for sales because they need to make money. So obviously sales is always open.

Usually there's marketing jobs open and other things like project management, program management, et cetera. But the goal with that is not to get like a project management job at McDonald's. That's not really doing you any good. Really. The goal would be to like, try to get a project management job at like Splunk.

Cisco or Dark Rhino Security or whatever, insert whatever security company, that would be your goal with those transition jobs. So that way, then you're going to get trained on their product suite for free. Usually now you become an expert in their products. Now you've got something else for your resume.

Now you've got an experience at Splunk on your resume. And as a hiring manager, if you're applying for a stock analyst job with me now, Splunk, yeah, you did product management, but. You've got a couple of Splunk certifications. You're more valuable than someone else just applying to that job. So these transition jobs don't sleep on them because a lot of you struggling right now to go get these tomorrow, these types of jobs, you literally could qualify for these tomorrow.

And you could be hired and you could be on your path to your actual cybersecurity job you want to do instead of trying to go from whatever you're doing now, mom, writing manager, whatever, trying to go straight to Pentester or Sophinos, whatever. That's a very competitive route. Though the route less competitive is going into one of these feeder roles and into  And to eventually getting into your cybersecurity career.

There was another question in QA around someone. I think they were an IT system administrator right now. They're trying to get into cybersecurity. You weren't specific in your question on what role in cyber you're trying to get into, but I would actually have very similar advice. And I would also say that you're probably doing cybersecurity work right now.

In your job, it's just not being called that. The thing I would do past the path of least resistance is that your next performance review, ask your manager if you can get cybersecurity job title somehow. Can I be the cybersecurity IT system administrator? Something where it's got cybersecurity job title, because that's going to help you.

And it's probably the easiest path for you right now is just getting the job title changed. And then from there, now you've got cybersecurity on your resume as a buzzword, a keyword. And that's makes it more easier, easier for you or getting that next, that's usually possible path of least resistance for someone that's currently working in it, trying to get like cyber security slash like engineer or something, work into your current job title, bigger company, probably can't do it.

Smaller company, like a startup or something, they're usually more likely to help you with those types of things. Again, Worst thing I can say is no about that, but that helps you when you start applying for other jobs by having that keyword in it. Yeah. I think we have to strike a balance here with you guys that we want to paint the reality so that you don't try and get into it and you think it's all going to be easy.

Painting the reality so you will hustle and you will work hard and you'll put the effort in. But at the same time, we also want to motivate you because there are a lot of opportunities. Obviously millions of people do work in cyber security. You're not trying to become an astronaut.  So it's entirely achievable.

Just the same as it is to become any other profession, but all those professions require the same or similar sort of effort. So I think there's great opportunities if you put in the effort and obviously personal branding is a key component of that. We haven't really, we've mentioned it, but what are the, do we have any examples of, of the benefits or the fruit of personal branding that you can mention?

Yeah. So I could speak on some people that some of you might see on social media. Would also say for myself, like. Prior to me creating a course for Cybery back in  2018 20, for basic pen testing to help people prep for the CDA to a certified ethical actor. For those that don't know what that cert exam is.

But anyways, prior to me doing that, I didn't really do personal branding. I was just that person behind the scenes, so to speak. Of course, with employers, I was always a high performer and things like that, but like the broader world had no clue who I was. So when I did that course, I went on a lot of like podcasts and media outlets and things like that, which I mentioned earlier, you can do for free.

And that, that helped accelerate a lot more opportunities to me. Uh, of getting out more things. That's when I started getting like awards and stuff like that. And I'm not a, awards are nice. I'm not a fan of them. I've never been like a trinket. I call them trinkets. I've never been a trinket collector for me.

Okay. You know, thanks. I appreciate it. I'm grateful for it. But at the same time, an award doesn't mean that someone is, there's a lot of awards out there and especially in this industry, some companies just buy them. Like those CyberX X awards, awards you see out there, companies look at us. We're a winner of the cyber.

Excellence awards, those you can, I don't know if you can still buy them, but you used to be able to buy them for a thousand bucks, you can make up your own award for a thousand dollars. And then you could be the, you'd be the only winner of it because you're the one nominating yourself and no one else knows about the award, right?

So then you're all of a sudden you're the cyber excellence award winner. And a lot of companies actually have done that over the years outside of myself. Uh, there's a lot of people in the industry that you know of because of the personal branding. The more recent one is, uh, Zanette Kamal, and Zanette, forgive me if I'm pronouncing your name wrong, but, uh, she, she's, uh, here in the U.

S., she's based in the U. S., but she's originally from Kenya, her and her husband, and yeah, that's her picture there, but she's done a great job of personal branding on LinkedIn. She also goes on local media outlets to talk about cyber security. She wrote a children's book. She published all that herself. She goes on podcasts.

She did the TEDx speaking stuff for her in her local area. Right. So she's spent a lot of time doing, building her personal brand on her own. Most of it for free. I don't think she's, I mean, aside from travel costs, I don't think she's spent any money. She's won a lot of awards, right? So she's a great example of someone that.

Is newer to the cybersecurity world, right? She does cloud security, but, um, I forget, I think it was maybe 20. I can, I'll get it wrong. So just look her up, but I forget she hasn't been in long, maybe five, six, seven years or so, like she hasn't been in like 20 plus years at some of us, but she's got a great personal brain because she's been on all these media outlets.

She gets invited all the time to things. And she just won the international 40 under 40 for shop security, which I had won a few years back. She just won that I'm actually here this year. I saw her post today on it. So she's a great example that. Anybody can build a personal brand, but again, it takes the work, right?

Zanetta Hustler, she's got four kids. She's, she was doing, she just finished her master's degree. She's married, right? So she's got the responsibilities of the family stuff. She works full time. She's the epitome in my definition of a hustler. When we talk about hustler. Someone like Sinead, right? That's constantly on the glide, constantly doing podcasts and media with the news outlets and, and speaking at different events and things like that.

And even book signings for her book with the children. And she's always out there and I'm not saying you all need to do all of that. You don't have to write a book and all this stuff. So if you're looking of like, how much work do I need to put in to really open up opportunities? She's a good example of that.

Myself, I'm like, I still put in 20 plus hour days, every single day. Even though, so that's why people still know about me. And I've scaled back over the past several years, but maybe not so many people know about me anymore. Still, it takes a lot of work to get where you want to go. But the cool thing is eventually there was a point, and I'm going to keep this generic because everyone's got different beliefs on this call.

There's a point where the universe is going to reward you, right? There's a point where you're fighting to get up that hill. And then eventually you put in enough work where you're here and then the opportunities right here, meeting you, right? So you're putting in all this work up front, maybe months or even a year or two of work.

And then eventually it becomes here where as long as you keep putting in a certain level of work, all the opportunities keep coming, coming to you. But it's got, it takes work. It's, it's not easy. I saw someone in a QA I'd put, Hey, you're supposed to be saying we need to put in work. Yeah. For anything in life.

Well, as you mentioned, the person that left that comment. Yes. Like cybersecurity is no different. And I think the problem is like the media, I mean, these educational programs time and station X excluded because Nathan and them, they tell it like it is. But there's a lot of programs out there that will, I don't want to say they're lying to you, but there'll be, you know, twist things a little bit to make you think that there's millions and millions of jobs open, but they're not.

In cyber security, there really are not, there really are not globally. They're not millions of jobs open. There might be a million requisitions open, but if you actually look at those, the majority of those are for experienced people, but not for someone brand new. Coming from, I don't know, I used to work at a janitor, so I'll say that.

So they're not for someone coming as a janitor, trying to get your first job. There's very few of those out there, which is why a lot of you are still struggling to find a job because those types of jobs, just, there's just so much risk for a company, a lot of times they're on a budget, things like that.

But that's where this personal branding we're talking about, that can open up jobs for you where someone may try to go get budget for you to hire you to create a job for you because of all the work you've done with your personal branding, it's your name out there to give back value. And as I said earlier, community to other people, jobs, I've had jobs created for me before I've had places reach out.

Okay, we want to create this job before I've already got budget for it. But before I actually like formally create this requisition, are you even interested?  And I've had that happen many times. I've even had situations where I'll apply for a job and because of my personal brand, I'm on the interview and they create a whole new role for me.

That's more money, more compensation, everything for me because of that brand. And because, because we're basically able to confirm like, yeah, this brand, we see that's the same guy that we're interviewing right now. We can see the consistency there. Right. So there's a lot of things and it's not just, it's not just around your job, right?

It opens up speaking opportunities. You might get media outlets reaching out to you. Like, Hey, can you give us commentary? On, you know, certain things, actually, I've got three requests in my inbox right now. I've got to, I've got to do snippets for articles for these different media outlets. Hey, can you do this or that for us?

That comes with your personal brand. Once you establish yourself or they see you establishing yourself, it, like I said, it, it's the good analogy is like farming versus fishing, right? The farmer plants their seeds, they water them and take care of them or whatever. Eventually they reap that harvest.

Whereas fishing, I've got to go out and fish every time. Sometimes I'll catch something. Sometimes I won't, but every time I got to keep putting in work. But if you just focus on a personal branding, it's like you're a farmer. You just keep sowing those seeds. You keep doing what you're supposed to do.

Eventually you're going to reap that harvest, which is going to be all those different opportunities for, again, conference speaking engagements. Could be sometimes paid speaking engagements. I wasn't able to do it because of some other. Personal things, but a few years back, I got, I was going to get an all expense paid trip to Hawaii to speak at a conference, like a totally free trip.

It was free for my wife as well. We had her airfare. We would add a cover bill like that. I like a free trip, free food, everything just because of my brain. Again, I wasn't, I had some personal family things, so I couldn't do it. But that's the power of that. I'm not saying you'll get a free trip to Hawaii.

Don't say, Hey, Ken said, you'll get up. Reach a trip to Hawaii or something, but opportunities like that present themselves as you continue building your brand. And that's the real key aspect of it. It's not just always employment. It's also just you getting all sorts of opportunities coming your way. And eventually you'll get to a spot.

As long as you keep putting in the work, like we said, you'll eventually get to a spot where you have to be picky. You have to say no to certain things because you don't have the time.  Yeah. One thing I would mention about Ken is that he is a online social butterfly. So Ken has introduced me to many people, uh, and some of which have ended up, uh, working.

For next. I think that's a kind of a practical takeaway. If you help others, the help comes back. So that's, it's a a practical thing that, you know, if you know that somebody needs something or in some way you can help out. If you do that, it, it, it comes back to you. And, and it's not because of a woo thing, it's just because people reciprocate.

It is, yeah. And so to get Woo for a second though. You, you want to reciprocate there, there is a thing called the law of reciprocity, whether you believe in it or not, but essentially you build up so much essentially equity, right, in giving that people naturally, this is exactly why I can send a text right now, if I knew a certain executive had a role open and I can say, Hey, Once here's your LinkedIn profile, that'd be a good fit for that role.

And my text will get answered, right? Or my call will get answered, or my LinkedIn message gets answered by like a CEO of a big company, not UnitedHealthcare. Anyways, we won't dive in that, into that stuff. But for those that didn't know, there was a CEO assassinated recently in the US. But anyways, I will say though, but like opportunities, a lot of reciprocity.

So if we, I'm not into organized religion. I know some people probably are, some people probably aren't. I'm going to, I'm going to paraphrase something because I used to be into organized religion and appreciating the Bible slug. Something that I, and I don't know exactly how it's phrased in the Bible for, so again, don't hate me Christians or whoever out there, but basically there's somewhere in there, there's scripture that says they sow the winds and they reap the whirlwinds.

So basically what we're talking about here, that law of reciprocity, right? Like what you're putting out without getting too on all of me, what you're putting out essentially you're getting back, right? So the more you're giving value, the more people want to help. If you're a jerk on social media, nobody wants to help you.

In fact, there was someone that was a jerk a few years ago, the entire, almost the entire industry banished them offline. All sorts of hackers were taking them down, and it didn't, because they were being a jerk to people. But if you're giving, even your enemies, I actually had, um, someone that didn't like me at all, for whatever reason, some people aren't going to like you no matter what, I don't care, whatever.

But this hater, this person would always be hating and stuff like that, but then one day I get a message from them, I referred these few people to your course, let me if they, let me know if they don't sign up, because I told them they need to buy it right away. And this is a hater. Oh, but because I kept giving and giving, Right.

And just totally ignoring, ignoring the haters. It's just as Nathan's mentioned, it comes back to you and it's again, if you're religious, you might believe that was your deity or whatever, that's bringing it to you, whatever. But the reality is. What you put out is what you're going to get eventually back to you.

And so we say that the give value to others, et cetera. Here's the main reason from just like a logical hiring manager's perspective. And again, this is just Ken's perspective here. But for me, if I look at someone that for free on social media, it's giving as much as they can. They're taking time out of their day.

They're probably skipping, watching the movie they want to watch. Or whatever, hanging with friends to post to try to help someone else that's struggling with that thing, or might be struggling with that thing. That's realistically someone I want on my team, right? And there's been several people that I see doing things like that, and I'm invested in different companies, and I'll work hard to try to get them even just some contract work.

I'm the investor, right? It's, it's what we're going to do type of stuff, right? If you're not familiar with an investor that owns majority of a company. So I'm able to pull that string because I'm an investor and I see this person working hard and I don't have, maybe the company's too small to support an actual full time position.

Maybe there's some projects they can work on so they can get that experience. And even if it's. I don't like people doing free work, but maybe it's even free work where I just pay them out of my own pocket type of stuff. Right. But that all happens because you put in the effort. Again, I'm not saying that's going to happen for everyone on this call.

I'll go totally broke. I see hundreds of people on this call. I'll go broke if all you want me to argue for things. But the reality is those opportunities come because.  Putting yourself out there, people feel comfortable. They want to give back to you. They want to help you. They want to introduce you to other people.

That's really how you accelerate a career. That's how you even accelerate your life is just those connections. And you'd be surprised. The other thing I'll say is always treat people no matter who they are. They just, because they're inside security. Whatever, even a janitor, because you never know who somebody knows.

I've had situations where I'm just, I'm nice to a front desk person, or I'm nice to you, the person taking out the trash, and then you find out later that's the cousin of the CEO, right? Or that they know a certain, so never just life advice in general. Like I always treat people well, because no matter what, they'll try to go out of their way to help you.

I, I've got a, we're friends, but I've got a friend that I'm always giving, constantly giving to this person.  And any advice, et cetera, never asked for anything in return. And so this person happened to be at a, by the meeting for high debt worth individuals. Some conversations happened, whatever, all of a sudden deals come in my way out of nowhere.

Right. That's the real power of it. So don't just think of it as your career, because I really want all of you to be open to the fact that you may get actual business opportunities from this personal branding stuff too, right? You might find that no company wants to hire you. But you get enough here in the U S we call it 1099 contract work.

You get enough contract work to pay you like double what you would have made in, in a regular cybersecurity job. Right? So that stuff does happen. And I actually know some people that they couldn't get hired for the life of them, but they started getting so much contract work because they were branding themselves, because they were always treating people, et cetera.

They never thought of starting a business. People were like, Hey, I really want you to work on this for me, please just let me know your rate. And so they started taking those on. And then again, still doing the hustle, still working hard. still treating people the right way and don't treat them like Elon Musk or others treat people the right way.

And, and that will always come back to you in some positive way to benefit you. I've never seen someone give so much and never get anything from, you know, again, if you are into religion, some of your deity or just the universe in general or whatever, I've never seen someone constantly give and never have an opportunity to come to the way at a certain point.

It's, it just has not, I've never seen it not have. So the more you give, The more you put in the work, at some point, like I said earlier, at some point you get high enough on that hill or that mountain where everything just starts coming your way. Yeah, absolutely. Let me share your book for anyone that's interested in interviews.

But that brings me on to a question I like to ask everybody really. What's your recommendation for a book? Not necessarily cyber security.  So you think everyone should really read all that's really made a difference to your life? I, first, I want all of you to pressure Nathan to write, to write another book.

Try to book on things so we can all get a signed copy. But I think, um, the biggest thing I see, like when I've interviewed people is typically people will get nervous in the interview rightfully. So you're being asked a bunch of questions. You don't know what they are in advance. Interviews are designed to, you know, kind of mess with you a bit and see how you solve.

Different problems on the fly. But one of the, one of the books, and you don't have to buy the book, cause I'm going to tell you exactly what the key aspect of it, but there's a book called how to stop worrying and start living by Dale Carnegie. And basically the whole message in the book, and it's a thick book, but like the whole message I took away from it is basically a single activity.

And essentially you just ask yourself, what is the worst Case scenario that could happen here. For example, you go for a job interview or something before you go in for the interview, what's the worst case. Okay. They hate your guts. They laugh at you. They whatever in your mind, the worst thing is. And then you say, okay, then you have to ask yourself, am I okay with that?

And if the answer is no, okay, what can I do to change? So maybe you've got to prepare more. Or whatever the case might be. But if you're okay with that, if you're like, I'm not a huge fan of this company anyways, I'm just trying to get a job, then you go in like, relax, right? The key with that, and this is, by the way, this is applicable for anything in life, not just a job interview, but it keeps you relaxed and what you're going to find, especially for job interviews, if you're more relaxed going into the interview, I don't really care about getting this job.

You're usually going to get a job offer or at a minimum, you move to the next stage, even if you're not the top candidate going in, even if you don't have the experience and all that stuff. It's like that, it's like. If you've ever worked in like some companies, you'll see the ways and people that just don't care.

And you're like, how'd this person become a manager? Like they're, they don't do any work, but they're making like double what I make. How is this possible? And that's how their mentality is. I don't care. So it's, for some reason, all the resistance of again, we'll get, I'll get a little bigger. All the resistance of the universe against them is gone because it's like, whatever.

If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. Okay. So that's the main message of that book is just instead of you getting nervous about whatever it is, again, it doesn't have to be an interview. It could be applying for jobs, like, Oh, I'm not qualified or whatever. Again, just ask yourself, okay, worst case scenario.

They said, no, they laugh at me. They say I'm funny looking, whatever it is. And then say, okay, am I okay with that? No, I'm not. Okay. Is there anything I can do to change that? Sometimes you can't, but for an interview, you can prepare more. And then you, before you practice and come more comfortable things like that.

So that's, that thing is something I use all the time.  Before I go on a podcast, like I said earlier, I'm an introvert, right? So even a podcast like this where Nathan and I, we've known each other for years, good friends, still would get nervous, right? I'm an introvert, right? But in my head, I'm like, what's the worst case?

Maybe Nathan makes fun of me on the whole podcast. Like, I'm okay with that. I got a good sense of humor, whatever. Yeah. We'll see what happens. Right. So that book, again, you don't have to buy it. That's the main message of that. There's also some other. Sadder books. I can't think of any right now, but there's one, um, there's a, there's also a book called, I don't know who the author is.

It's called Seeing the Big Picture. Basically. It's a book. It's more of a business book. Yeah, I think it's a Kevin or whatever, but yeah. Wrong it, it, y'all will find it, I think. Um, actually I gotta show, yeah, it's Kevin Koch. It's the author. Yeah, it's on my shelf over there. Koch. Yeah, that's, yeah, that dude.

But basically it, it helps you understand like the, the business mindset. 'cause at the end of the day, a business is a business right. So it helps you as like a technical person understand kind of the business and how your leadership will think. Again, you don't have to buy anything that I recommend, even the book that Nathan shared.

Actually, if everyone will keep a secret and don't tell the publisher, I'm going to share a version of the first version of our book with Nathan, PDF version, just please. I'll do the pinky swear here in the U. S. Promise we won't tell anybody about that. And Nathan can share it out with everyone if he wants.

Station X community. But, um, that book and some others That's very kind of you. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just don't tell the publisher. But really, it's out there. People have already been sharing it out for a year or two since we've run it. So I saw other books around, um, They didn't see you looking at books around like human psychology and stuff.

You understand people. But again, Books not going to ever be a replacement for you having real life experience in something. And you can go on like YouTube and just look at videos for free. So for example, there's, I think it's called persuasion. There's maybe a book called persuasion by Robert Gilbani.

And I don't remember how to spell his last name, but it's, I think it's like C I A L. D I N E, that's his last name or something. He's got some books around like human psychology, right? So stuff like that. There's a book by a former FBI agent around called Never Split the Difference around negotiation stuff.

But again, all these things, you can usually find a free version of some of these older books on YouTube for free and audiobook. And you can also find people that have been summaries for free on YouTube videos and stuff. So if you want human psychology books, just like human psychology book summaries, search along and you can see what pops up.

Anything, even job interview skills, right? You know, we're talking about the book and stuff, but also there's a lot of people that have, again, a lot of them have a coaching program that they want you to buy, but some of them will put out good free information on how to prepare for interviews, how to write resumes.

There, there, the problem isn't a lack of information these days. It's a lack of effort.  We talked about the hustling stuff. It's not that all this information isn't out there. It's that.  I'll give you a quick example. Someone reached out and they're like, do you do mock interviews? And I, I just don't do calls anymore.

I don't have the time or the patience. Okay. That's not, so I don't do mock interviews anymore. And so this person reached out and said, just record yourself, asking yourself some questions and answering them as if you were the interviewer and interviewee, and then make sure you're on camera so I can look at your body language and stuff and then I'll give you a feed, no charge.

Just, that was like six months ago. Never sent me anything. Never sent me a video. When we talk about hustle and stuff, it's things like that, right? That person could have gotten, you feedback from a hiring manager and I was already planning to send it to other hiring managers to get their feedback on how this person interviewed.

So you get a whole pool of experienced people that are the people going to hire you, but the person didn't do the effort, right? They didn't, all they had to do was film a video with Loom or whatever free software,  10, 15 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, depending on how many questions they ask themselves and answer.

I already said, I don't care about the audio. It doesn't have to be a perfect video. Just send me a video. Record it with your phone if you want, but that person didn't do it. So what we've talked. A few times throughout this episode about the hustle that putting in the effort, that's what's really going to separate all of you from everyone else out there, right?

There's, we've had, I think a few hundred people, 200, 300 people, whatever on this call. We're on it. There's probably less than 10 percent of the people that are actually going to do what we're saying. It's just the reality of it. So if you're one of that 10%, you're probably going to get a job real, real clean.

It probably won't be next week, but depending on what you're trying to do, if you put in that effort. The next few months, you may get a job, whereas the other people that are excited, they're like, Oh, he shared so much good information, but they never get action on it. You're going to see them still on social media.

Like keep getting certs. What's the problem? Why don't I keep collecting college degrees? I can't get a job. What's going on? The biggest factor missing is that effort at the end of the day. And so I encourage all of you, hopefully more than 10 percent will actually put in the effort on the things we've been sharing on here and put in that work.

It takes time. It takes time. Like anything, but eventually you get good or at least good enough to get your first job. Yeah. And to, and for putting in the, the effort, I have a recommended. So this here essentially is really just saying Ken's, Ken's saying here about you've got to put in the effort. The big secret is you've got to put the effort in, you've got to be all in and, uh, you've got to hustle, you've got to do your personal branding.

And, yeah, if anyone's interested, a bit more info there. There's one, look, I know we're over time. So thanks for everyone staying on. One, one question in QA was around, and of course I forgot it. It was around like the freelancing stuff. So it really depends on your country and what's allowed, but you can go on websites like your cyber, so F I V E R dot com for depending on where you are in the world is probably other.

Platforms like that. One thing to keep in mind though, is that the vast majority of smaller businesses just don't care about cybersecurity until they're hacked. And so you advertising cybersecurity services probably won't do much on those platforms if you advertise like security awareness training, that might, but a better route for those with technical skills is a lot of them need help setting up what's called an email autoresponders, get response, Oh gosh, you have to campaigns, there's a lot of them out there these days.

But basically setting up their technology stack for them to do marketing and sales and stuff. There's usually some money there. And again, I'm speaking from the U S market, again, other countries, a lot different. There's a past system to solve with that. We've got that here in the U S, but I'm for, I'm not for anymore type of thing.

There's a lot of opportunity here in the U S, but I'm very mindful it doesn't exist. In other countries, but websites like that where they already allow freelancers, but also is easier for someone with a small business, like in the U S for payment. I can just pay you through like Fiverr or some third party site and they handle like the tax sales tax or whatever I need to worry about VAT.

I think it is in the EU stuff. They handle all that. So it's easier for the business owner to actually pay you again. Some of those sites you can't do based on the country you're in, but that's more individual that's outside of the scope of this call, but using sites out there already. And then again, You've still got to have hustle.

You can't just, there's a movie from, I think it was 1989. So well before some of you were even born, it was called Field of Dreams. It's a baseball movie here in the U S stars, a guy named Kevin Costner. Who back then was a big actor. And basically there's one line in the movie says like, if you build it, they will come.

I can tell you right now in the real world, that does not exist. And the whole thing is like that guy real quick, the guy builds a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield. He's a farmer. He builds it. And then that's the line of the movie. If you build it, they will come eventually. Like all these dead baseball players show up and I'm not going to spoil the movie.

You can look it up online. It's probably a free version somewhere on YouTube or whatever. But the reality is in the real world, if you build it, they will come doesn't exist. So even if you put up your stuff on a freelance website, you still got to let people know what you can do. So you still got to reach out to business owners here in the U S you can do like volunteer webinars with your local city, the chamber of commerce, things like that.

Usually different big cities around the world, they've got some kind of a business. type of ecosystem, like some kind of organization, even if it's like banks or whatever, financial institutions, like somebody has got something for the business and so you can say, Hey, I'm inside security or I'm a cybersecurity expert, whatever, I'd like to do a free webinar for the businesses you work with about how to spot phishing now.

So how about how to secure your mobile device or whatever, simple. Things like that, get your name out there. It also can lead to that contract work I mentioned. But again, like I said, if you build it, they will come. It doesn't exist. You've got to put in that effort. Same thing with your career. Just because you create a LinkedIn doesn't mean people are going to be like, Oh, Let me go to your profile.

You've got to, like I said earlier, you got to show value. You got to give back, give value. Then people will come. Then all of a sudden, it'll be trickle at first. Like the most frustrating thing is when you start posting and nobody's commenting. Nobody's liking your posts. You get like 20 views. That's fine.

That we've all been there. I still, I've got 40 something thousand followers on LinkedIn. And I still have posting in a hundred views. So understand that there's the algorithm working against me too. So just consistency. And that's why I said earlier, if you can only post on a Sunday, every Sunday you're posting,  you can post once a week or once every two weeks, starting out, whatever you can do, if you feel like you can post every day and you can be consistent with that, then by all means do it.

But again, your situation is unique. Some of you might have to go, I'm dating myself here, but if I wanted to use the internet back in the day, which by the way was dial up, usually I'd have to go someplace and use their s t because I didn't have the money for it. And so I would ride my bicycle to wherever to use the dial up and hope that nobody called.

Throwing us the dial up for me to use. Some of you have that same kind of struggle where you have to go someplace to use the internet because you don't have that at your, where you live. And so again, whatever you can be consistent with is the main, even if it's once a month, something is better than nothing.

But again, what we talked about earlier, your profile needs to be in order first before you do anything else. Get that squared away and then you can worry about the other stuff. Yeah. Somebody asked about if they're nervous in an interview, should they, and they're eager, should they show that in their interview?

I thought that was an interesting question or they're desperate for the job, should they show that? No goodness. No, that's the same thing with like your LinkedIn, right? So if you're reaching out to people and you're like, please give me a job, they're just going to block you. But if you reach out, what we talked about earlier, how can you give value?

So if you're in an interview and I've been there, it is what it is. I've, I've really struggled when I was younger, financially, one of the reasons I went in the military and secure in the U S and it's very difficult. A lot of us have been there. Very few people inside are like, we're born with that silver spoon with mom and dad in the home and they paid for your college and you had the, the The house and all that, most of us didn't have all that.

We've been there where it's like, if I don't get this job, I can't like pay for food type of stuff. Been there many times. Try to use that method I mentioned earlier. What's the worst case they say though? Okay. I'm not really okay with this, but I am okay. Cause I know I've got five more applications. I just put in this more.

Or whatever, so maybe one of those will give me an interview. It's real hard when you like have no money or you're really struggling financially because you really need this job. The other thing I would say for you in particular is if you're going into an IT or science security interview and you're like, I desperately need this.

Think about some of those transition jobs. Can I get one of these other ones easier? Can I get more interviews for a sales job? Then trying to become a pen tester, because if you've got like 30 interviews scheduled for sales, if one or two are like, no, we don't like you. You're a lot less nervous. Cause I got 25 more just this week.

I don't care. So it's your situation. Again, you've got to, I think someone mentioned earlier, like there's not a lot of like pen testing jobs where they are. They're trying to move into be a pen tester. We've got some it background or whatever. Bug bounties. You can do bug crowd or whatever you can do. So half the one do some bug bounties, get your name out there.

And then that might open up opportunities. Yeah. Or you also applying for that person in particular with some IT background to apply to bigger companies that maybe have a presence in your country. And again, you may have to go into a transition role just to be at that big company, but then you can move into the actual job you want.

But yeah, as far as being an artisan interview, when basically you need this job or else you can't eat. You can't feed your family. You can't pay your rent or whatever. The only way is to go in beforehand with the mindset, how can I prepare more in advance, get more interviews, maybe get some contract work going or something where I don't need this as much.

That's why it's easier for people that already have a job to get a job because they go in whenever. to the interview because they already have a job. And someone that's been laid off, for example, for, and been trying for a year to get a job, they're going to come across as more desperate, like you were mentioning, because they don't have that job.

They don't have that kind of, you know, security, even though a job is not really security. But They don't have that perceived security because they're like, I need to be my family. So it's really just that preparation. I know that's a very generic answer for you. I wish I had a better one for you, but it's really just preparing like what other things could I do if this cybersecurity stuff doesn't work out?

What are the things that I do? And I should just let me hop on live. I was talking to Nathan about here in the U. S., like insurance claims adjuster. Is a job. So for those of you watching this in the US and you're like, I need a, I need a job, I got to pay my bills. I'm tired of doing Amazon delivery. Like you can make, depending on the type of insurance, adjusting anywhere from 30 to 75 grand a year starting.

Again, it depends a lot on the type of adjusting and for the lower level, like salaries, those are the places that'll train you for free. Get you your license and stuff that you need. And you can go, you'd be basically getting a paycheck starting day one. The higher ones you would have to pay for, which the training, I think is a couple hundred bucks, depending on your state to get your license and maybe some more or whatever.

But you can then be making what an entry level stock analyst would make. I know a lot of, in the U S a lot of people be like, Oh, I'm going to make six figures. No, you're not. As a stock analyst, you're probably going to make in the 50  to maybe 75 range these days. Again, it depends on the employer, some may get more, some less, but typically that's the range.

So you can make that, insurance claims adjusting, a lot less barrier to entry. You can literally do the training in a matter of weeks, get your license. Start doing work and stuff to pay your bills. Again, that's here in the U S where we have a lot more opportunity than other countries. But for that person in particular, start thinking outside the box.

What else is available where you live that you could potentially do, even if it's another career, because if you have bills to pay, you have bills to pay. At the end of the day, you don't want to be homeless. I assure you, you don't want to, you don't want to live that life. So that's my advice. We have plenty of people doing stepping stone roles.

At Station X, we have a concept of the longer term vision within the app. They, they, they put it in there and. Because that's in the future and it's not necessarily, and we usually say one to five years for that. And then a lot of people, you have to say to them, you've got to, you've got to do the milestones on the journey to get there.

I was just going to, I was also just going to say as well, when you're thinking about, again, you're in an interview, et cetera, think about it from the perspective of the person that actually trying to hire you, it's actually quite hard to hire good people. So anything you do that makes that easier for me.

Golden. And if you've got personal branding and things online showing value, that really cuts down the effort. I've got to go to This is the thing about, uh, certs, although often it's a piece of paper, it's a shortcut. And, and that's the thing, it's a shortcut for hr and that's why they're, that's where they're there some certs though.

You do learn some good stuff, so they are definitely worth doing. But really. If you, if there's things online, it makes it easier for me to know that I, I want to hire you, or I want to interview you. Yeah. So if you think about it from their perspective. Yeah. Especially if you're showing like the hands on you can do, it's, it makes it so much easier.

I can, I look at your LinkedIn. I see that you can do some basic stuff with QLADAR or Qualys or whatever, whatever you scan. I see that you can connect the dots between a lab you're doing and probably the real world, as Nathan said, that makes it easier. Now that, that is. I think another caveat there, depending on the company, right?

Cause some companies will strip out all the personal detail, the name and stuff. So I might get a resume. I don't know if you are, cause they stripped out the LinkedIn and all that. So I'm just going on the resume itself. One thing I want to mention also is that two things, I'm gonna cover two things here.

One is your LinkedIn, your resume, any type of personal branding you do. The only purpose of that, when it comes to employment is to get you an interview. And then. How you do in the interview is how you actually get the job. So understand those are oftentimes people like connect all those, but really they're siloed.

Okay. You sold me on talking to you in the interview because of your personal branding, your resume, whatever. I saw something alike. Now, let me talk to you. Cause you're one of the candidates. If you got an interview, some people will say you got the job. I disagree with that, but I think you're a good candidate for the job because you got an interview.

And now I'm just trying to, to mention earlier, make it easy on people. Right now in my head, I'm just trying to figure out a way to say no to you so I can lower my candidate. If you keep me saying yes to you, then you're going to move forward to the next stage or then other people, then the next stage in however many stages.

Some companies are ridiculous. I've done six, seven, eight interviews. Before and, and, um, it's like, when, when's this going to end type of stuff. Something else about personal branding. Someone asked about the home lab. Should you build like ladding? Depends on the role you're going for. And again, I am Mr. I won't call myself Mr.

Free, but I'm all about not spending a lot of money to do things. Like you don't have to spend a lot of money. There's a lot of free versions of tools out there. There's comparable tools that have a free, that are free, that you can use to do a similar thing as like a tool you would use in an enterprise.

Just show me that you understand the thing versus a specific tool, if that makes sense to everyone. Like when you're talking about, when we're talking about home labbing, you don't need to go out and buy a switch from Cisco and spend whatever amount of money. And that was like the olden days. Oh, look at me.

I set up a, my home network. Look at this. That's the olden days, right? You can literally just. Do a free aws account, but you have to put a credit card on file with them, but do a free account Show me how you do access control or something something very basic like that record it and then delete everything So you don't get charged by amazon and then post that.

Hey, look at me. I got cloud skills I can I can say I can create a creating service account and secure it with two factor authentication Um, here's how I did that. And now if I'm looking for someone that's got some cloud familiarity, you're probably going to get an interview, right? Because someone else that didn't show me that again, home lighting stuff, free stuff, just, and again, that's really depends on the particular familiar cheese.

Um, but yeah, yes to your, I think to your question, yes, it can be part of personal branding. But again, what I mentioned earlier about the medium, if you don't feel comfortable like recording your screen or something, if you're doing something and explain it, just do a post, just do a written post or whatever is your comfort level.

That's the biggest thing because if you're not comfortable doing it, but they're not going to like, again, I'm not a big writer. So for me to write a book, hats off to the publisher and my coauthors for keeping me comfortable. On schedule because I, I didn't want to write anything honestly. And even the second version of the book that we wrote, I was like, Oh, what is this going to end type of stuff?

Right. Cause I don't like writing like that. I'm not, I'm just, I'm naturally a writer. My thing is I'll click record, right? Or I'll come and I'll share hopefully some good stuff on a podcast like that. So understand your medium, what you don't have to necessarily enjoy it, but what you're comfortable with.

That's the biggest thing. So even a home lab, like if you don't feel comfortable building something and showcasing it, don't do it. You can build hands on skills and not record yourself. showing it all the time type of thing. Like you can communicate your value and the value you give to others in different ways.

So again, whatever you're comfortable with, cause when you're comfortable with it, you'll then stick to it and have that consistency, which is what's really going to pay off. Also, if we're lucky, Ken will come back and do. Another podcast on interviews and interview prep. So if there's an interest in that, which I know there is, then we'll, we'll sort that out as well, and that'll be much appreciated if people are welcome to connect or follow me on LinkedIn.

If they find me, I'm sure it's pretty easy. And also actually, if anybody has anything interesting that they think that they would like to share, that might be nice for the Station X podcast.  Then you can get, get in contact to contact at stationx. net or just go to  stationxcontact and drop us a message there.

So Ken, I think finally, what's the takeaway then? What we've spoke a lot. What's the, what's the best single piece of advice we can do? What's the takeaway? All right. Single piece. So I think, I think the single piece will be a broad context, right? The first thing you need to figure out what you actually want.

We talked about those kind of transition or feeder roles. You as the individual listening to this or the recording or whatever, You got to figure out what you want to do. Number one, number two, go in with a mindset of I'm going to deliver value to others as much as I can. And with that wraps that personal branding all that other stuff we've talked about.

And then the third thing I think is just really being willing to stick with it. That consistency of, we talk about that hustle, like that consistency is what pays off. A lot of people, like we said, will do it for months. Or two, but the people that constantly do it and over time. And because when you think about your posting on social media, it might take people a while to find your post.

I've had people comment on the post from a year ago because they just found it. I just showed up in their feed. That consistency is really what's going to get your name out there more and help you move the out there. I know that was more than one thing, but those pick what you want to do. Focus on delivering value to others as much as you can, and then be consistent with it, and eventually, like we said, you'll, you'll reap the benefits of that.

Thank you very much for peering and helping us and everybody else. If you, if there's any other questions that you want to answer, don't, don't let me, don't let me kick you off. If you, if there's something that you saw that, that you want to answer. Yeah. Yeah. So that last one I'll address, I'll address to you real quick.

So someone, a couple of people asked about what's the value of, of My cybersecurity degree, it depends on so much right on the company, on where you live in the world. The reality is it's not going to be what people claim it is. And what I mean by that is it's not going to be like, oh, you get this degree or, or you get the certification and we're done and everyone's going to throw millions of dollars of money at you to hire you.

And it's just not reality, right? No matter what you do, right? Even as you go get. I don't know, ServiceNow or Splunk certs or whatever, there's always more hustle you need to do to get where you want to go. The other thing I want to address, someone asked about the contract work, like, how does the branding work for that versus the career stuff?

It's the exact same thing. Honestly, it's the exact same thing. The only difference on your profile would be like, I'm open to contract work as well. Right? Literally, that's the change on your profile. You're like, I'm looking for, you know, this type of role and I'm also open to contract. And then you still are giving value.

You're still branding yourself as that expert. In the area of the only difference on your end of additional work is you want to be more proactive than just you want to try to do some free webinars. Or different organizations that have those potential clients in them and just keep giving value like that.

And that eventually will lead, potentially, I don't want to say will lead, but potentially will lead to, you know, some contract work coming your way as well. But that's, it's a very minute difference. Overall, the personal branding is the same thing. You're essentially, a lot of people use the term thought leader.

You're just building yourself as a thought leader in that area, if you will. Even if you're brand new and you're just learning. Because you become that go to person for someone else that Nathan mentioned, some of that might be behind you. Here in the U S we, we often use the term, someone that's a chapter behind you in the book.

You only have to be one chapter ahead of other people, right? For you, it might be easy and second nature to download VirtualBox, install it, download VM images, import them in and, you know, configure everything, set up a NAT network, but for someone that has no idea how to do that, you're the king or queen, right?

Oh, this person is great. But if you've never shared that, that person doesn't have value. The last thing I'll leave all of you with, especially for those trying to get their first job that are maybe thinking about an expert when I, and granted, I've been doing pen testing for a while when I put out that first course, but I looked and I saw that there was like all these other people with courses, right, on hacking stuff, and especially this Nathan guy from Station X.

And I was like, there's no way I'm like, nobody's going to take my course. But I was like, whatever, I'll put it out. Nobody will take it. Whatever. But what I found out when I put it out there and people started taking it is people reached out to me and they said, I'm so glad you put this out. I finally understand this thing because of the way you explain it.

I've been struggling for years to learn this and I've never been able to learn it because of my learning disability or whatever. Until you explain. So for all of you, I want to encourage you. It's not just about personal branding. We talked about the value, but understand there's someone out there right now that can only learn from you somewhere in the world.

You don't know where they are. They might be right down the street. They might be all the way across the world, like many of my students. But if you never share what you're learning, if you never share your wisdom, you're actually doing that person a disservice, right? Cause they're never going to be what they could be.

Because you're not the person teaching it, right? Again, you've got a way of explaining things that someone else can learn from. And also the other thing I'll add there is that you've got a way of explaining things that even people that are experienced like us can learn from, right? If there's something I'm trying to learn and you might be good at it.

Someone mentioned they were a software developer. I mentioned I slept early, right? And you want me to program something to see? Good luck. I'm going to pay someone. That's good if that's doable. So if I wanted to learn C and you're an expert in that, right, you're posting about that, for example, then you may explain it in a way that like, Oh gosh, yeah, of course.

Right. And I've had that happen with courses. I've, I'm trying to learn something. Right. And keep abreast on something like, I don't get this. This person is, I don't get how they're teaching it. And then someone else comes along that maybe has a couple of years less experience than that person. And they've got a course and I buy it and I'm like, Oh my God, that makes perfect sense now.

So I really want all of you to understand that it's not, we talk about personal branding and a lot of this is focused on you, right? But the reality is this is more about someone else, right? Someone else out there that, that needs you. It helped them get to the next level in their career. And you never know, they might be the person that invents something.

They, they invent that staples easy button. And then we just click it. Like all the vendors play, we just click it and everything fixes itself and smelts it. But that person will never get there without your help. Right? So I really encourage all of you, even if you don't want to go to a personal brand, whatever, give something back.

Cause there is someone out there that can only learn from the way that you explain. Even if you feel like, Oh, I don't know what I'm talking about. I stumble. Maybe I have a stutter. I use stuff like that a lot. Someone out there is going to be like, this person is amazing as an instructor, teaching me these things, even though they're brand new to me.

Just, I want to leave you all with that. We get in our heads a lot, especially when you're more entry level and trying to get your first job. Oh, what value would I bring to the world? You have a ton of value right now. And again, someone can only learn from the way you teach it. Please, I really encourage all of you to like actually take the advice we've given here and actually put in the work and put that information out there that you're learning, because again, someone right now is waiting on it.

Yeah. That's amazing advice. We heavily encourage people to teach others at Station X. The other thing is it increases your own retention rate. I think science shows something like 90 percent retention rate because you re imagine the subject and re represent it in your brain. And in doing that and understanding someone else's perspective as to how they might need to receive that information, it helps you, it helps you learn.

Yeah. Highly recommend. Last thing, let me just share a question about how can you learn about cybersecurity? There's lots of places. I recommend cybersecurity diaries. Check that out. Also our blog, there's hundreds, maybe there's a thousand. Articles here on careers and cybersecurity and every other thing.

And of course you can apply for membership. We only have applications now because actually what we've been talking about here, we're, we're only really looking for people that are ready to. To really climb the hill. So feel free to apply. Ken, been great having you. I think we ran over by a couple of minutes.

Yeah. Just a few. Thanks everyone for your patience and staying on with us. Hopefully we gave you some value with this. Yes. And hopefully myself and Ken will be back doing something around interviews or maybe something else. And John, thank you for being with us. It's kept us nice and warm. All right, guys.

You're welcome. Oh, good. All right. Okay. See you later everyone. And there you have it, some incredible insights from Ken about leveraging personal branding to accelerate your cybersecurity career. If this episode help you think differently about your career journey, smash. That button to like and subscribe.

Your support helps us bring more industry experts and career changing content straight to you. And if you're ready to take action, now I've got two powerful resources waiting for you below. First grab our free cybersecurity career mega pack. It's packed with certification guides, role breakdowns, salary insights, and exclusive tools to match you.

With your perfect cybersecurity path. Second, check out station X's comprehensive training programs in the description. We've helped thousands of students launch successful careers in cybersecurity, and we'd love to help you too.  Thanks for watching this episode of cybersecurity diaries. I'm Nathan, and I'll see you on the next one.