How to Advance In Your Career as a Penetration Tester

by Graeme Messina on July 30, 2018

Penetration testing is essential for maintaining security in modern enterprises, with some organizations hiring staff specifically for this purpose as part of an ongoing security-hardening process. Penetration testing is effective because it allows your security team to intelligently target parts of your system without being too general. This has added benefits: it saves the company time and money as the tests can be carried out in a controlled and modular fashion.

But how do you, as a security professional, advance your own career as a penetration tester? How would you even get started towards such a goal? Perhaps you are already working as a penetration tester, but are looking for ways to advance your career prospects and adding to your skills? We’ll try to cover some of the most important information that relates to finding your way towards getting started, or getting further, as a penetration tester.

Why Pentesting?

If you are a person that enjoys coming up with unique and sophisticated fixes to problems, then pentesting could be just the job role that you are looking for. It’s a blend of cybersecurity, system administration, application development, programming and more. Perhaps you have an interest in all of the above fields, but you lack natural ability. What then?

There are many related fields that remain in the realm of information security but are not so technically demanding in the sense of being hands-on out in the field. A certification such as the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) can help to move your information security career into a managerial or governance role. To find out the current requirements for the CISSP, take a look here.

Pentesters have excellent earning potential, with PayScale showing that the average salary for a qualified pentester is just over $80,000 USD per year. Other (Read more...)