It was 2019 and I was on the Dave Ramsey debt snowball and I was gazelle intense baby. My wife and I had just had thrown everything in the yard on a Saturday on an impulse and had a yard sale. My neighbors all thought we were crazy but it wasn’t the first time. I am sure they thought we were in some type of financial hardship and bought too big of a house. A few neighbors even had the curiosity to ask us directly to our face why we were holding the yard sale, and if we were moving. We made a few hundred bucks, but I didn’t stop there. I locked myself in my home office the next weekend determined not to come out until I had a side hustle. I scrolled through all sorts of articles until I landed on making a simple ebook. It had never crossed my mind at this point to make an ebook. Over the course of the next several hours the simple ebook turned into a master plan to change the industry.
A simple ebook suddenly evolved into “three books, five years, six figures”.
This was a program designed for the cybersecurity industry to soften the exponentially increasing demand for cybersecurity analysts. I knew at the time that cybersecurity had these two problems:
There wasn’t enough talent to fill the positions that needed to be filled
Candidates were job hopping and taking advantage of the situation to go from $50k to $100k+ in just two to three years.
I knew that this couldn’t go on forever and the industry would correct itself. So I devised this plan for employers and for those with atypical backgrounds… those without formal education and certifications, but were self taught, to be able to easily fill in their gaps with my education and play matchmaker with employers. I could sell a few books, and get money when they are hired and for every promotion they got if they stuck around long enough to make it to Lead SOC Analyst. Its a win win, people with atypical background get a chance, and employers get an employee that will stick around.
I worked on this idea feverishly and even threw up a temporary website and started reaching out to some of the vendors I’ve worked with professionally. Fortinet was super awesome and supporting. They took the time to tell me about their vet program and how it would help them.
I was on fire and my master plan had the grandiosity that even Elon Musk would have been proud of.
I woke up on Monday and went back to work and reality set in again. I left my bubble and back to the world. I looked at what I did that weekend and thought some of it was still good. I’m only one person, and I just came up with a plan that was so big that it’s daunting in reality. But just for kicks, I sent emails to publishers with the idea, and more than a few got back to me interested in my books. But it was almost as if they were used to this type of thing and started to reel back my idea to something reasonable. That’s when Jump-start Your SOC Analyst Career happened, and Cyber NOW Education, LLC was born. For tax purposes for all the fantastic royalties that I was going to get (right…).
The NOW! is symbolism for the gazelle intense ignite of passion that I felt that weekend that lives with me a little bit every single day as I continue to grow these ideas little by little in my free time.
Today we are still focused on people with atypical backgrounds and we are still focused on being useful and relevant to the industry and to employers.
The ideas developed into a mission of accessible cybersecurity training.
Accessibility means more than wheelchair ramps, and handicap parking, it means that learning can be accessed and consumed by people with all backgrounds, even including but not limited to those with disabilities. This means our content has to be at price point that is accessible (sub $100), the format in which it is delivered has to be accessible (books, audio books, video, subtitles,.. etc), where they can access it has to be accessible (phone, desktop, tablet, poorer countries), the content that is consumed has to be as useful as mainstream premium content (even though it might be on less of a budget), and the content has to be engaging, and interesting.. people want to consume it.
Its a challenging and tricky ordeal and thats what makes it so much fun. Excited to be continuously working on the same project for so long.
Tyler Wall is the founder of Cyber NOW Education. He holds bills for a Master of Science from Purdue University, and also CISSP, CCSK, CFSR, CEH, Sec+, Net+, A+ certifications. He mastered the SOC after having held every position from analyst to architect and is the author of three books, 100+ professional articles, four online courses, and regularly holds webinars for new cybersecurity talent.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
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Check out my latest book Jump-start Your SOC Analyst Career: A Roadmap to Cybersecurity Success published June 1st, 2024 and winner of the 2024 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards.
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