Background- My name is Cole Detrick and I am 23 years old and currently living in Dallas Texas. I have been experimenting with computer hardware/software as a hobby for as long as I remember but have only begun to take a future in IT, specifically Cybersecurity seriously since June of this year. I began my Journey by researching and taking notes from online forums, YouTube channels, other blogs, and anywhere on the internet you might find people breaking and securing devices and systems. Shortly after I decided to pursue the Google IT Support Specialist Certificate, upon completing that, 2 weeks later I also completed the Google Cybersecurity professional certificate. I took a short break to figure out where to go next in my journey, A+? Net+? AWS cert? I began to get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information and roads I could take until I came across the ISC2 CC certificate which was completely free and came coupled with 21 hours of free training. The next 2 days I finished the 21 hours of training as well as took every free practice test I could find on the internet and scheduled my test for 2 days after. Upon passing this exam it was solidified that I wanted to pursue security and what better next step than the gold standard to entry level Security...Security+.
Resources
The first resource I used was Darril Gibson's "Get Certified, Get Ahead"
I read this book cover to cover in 12 days reviewing topics that were unclear to and making notes, which I believe was a mistake. The reason I say this is because for me personally there are much more efficient ways to learn the topics in the book rather than reading them word for word due to how the author explains each topic. If I was able to do this again I would use this textbook as a supplementary resource for something like an online guided course, turning to the book for only topics I was quite confused about. Overall I did like this book mainly because the author has a way of explaining topics that break them down and creates comparisons to non-IT related things to make it more understandable for someone who doesn't come from an IT background (the book really helped me with understanding encryption algorithms).
The second resource used was Jason Dion's "Security+ Complete course & Exam"
There is a reason this course is recommended by everyone, he goes over everything I personally saw on the exam and more, not much more to say this course is great for anyone who wants a structured way of training for the exam.
The third resource used was passemall.com. This website has 750+ Practice exam questions and I personally have completed every single one of them. This website is perfect for getting your practice exam repetitions in and the last 3 sections of each module I would say are 10-15% harder than the actual exam questions or other practice exams practice questions. I used this website to really drive home the topics in my head and condition myself to read every word of every question and provide my best response to each question based on the information given.
Conclusion
My training for Security+ spanned from 10/06/23-11/15/23, I scored a 795/900 on the exam studying on average 6 hours a day, I'm very happy with my experience studying and taking the exam as I feel I have learned so much valuable information I cannot wait to implement into practice. For my next steps, I believe I will be pursuing CySA+ next as well as creating a home lab to implement tools and concepts learned in my recent studies. Thank you very much for taking the time to read about my experience and please feel free to give me comments on how to improve my blog or just to chat, thank you.
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