What are the Most Important SOC Skills

Searching for the two most important SOC skills.

What are the Most Important SOC Skills?

As I sat and thought about the two most important SOC analyst skills, I started to write them down, and my list turned into eight items. This is What are the Most Important SOC Skills?

This is my list of examples of the content I have covered.

Cybersecurity Analysis

• How to do security analysis

Operating System fundamentals & Networking fundamentals

• SOC Analyst Prerequisite Skills

Networking (people) & Effective Communication

• SOC Analyst JOB Hunting

Scripting (not necessarily full development)

Cloud Technologies (AWS, Azure, Terraform, Serverless)

• 30-minute Honeypot Project

• Azure Cybersecurity Labs

  
  

SOC Analyst Projects

• SOC Analyst Projects

As I looked over this list, I had to categorize skills into two categories: hard technical skills and soft skills. Then, I had to pick one from each category, as being an SOC analyst is a delicate and equal balance of the two. Hard technical skills can sometimes be trained much faster than soft skills. Technical skills can be taught by reading, studying, and following a clearly defined learning path, whereas learning soft skills is often trial and error and practice over time.

Hard Technical Skills

The award for the most valuable complex technical skill goes to networking because you can get by with not knowing how to use Active Directory for a while, and no employer will expect you to know already how to conduct a security analysis (it will give you the edge!). Both of these require a prerequisite of networking fundamentals.

Soft Skills

In the age of remote work and the duties of a SOC analyst, the most valuable soft skill award goes to understanding. So much of our daily lives consists of reading and writing emails, security analysis, instant messages, text messages, LinkedIn, and everywhere else. Sometimes, getting lost in different understandings with pages of text is easy. People tend to be less verbose with their thoughts over text because it takes longer to type them out than to speak. So much of our lives is directed by a lesser form of understanding other people.

Conclusion

As you can see, the most essential thing a SOC analyst can learn is how to communicate. Whether that be computers talking to computers or pinging your teammates on chat, you’re communicating all day long. No system can have security when it is open to talking to others; that is the breath of life into cybersecurity. The cybersecurity industry exists because computers are interconnected. Mastering the basics of communication will lead to a foundation built on cement; it doesn’t change much.

How to learn these skills

Gaining the CompTIA Network+ certification is an excellent start in learning networking. The best way to learn to improve and provide more clarity in reading and writing is to get a blog on Medium. Then, get a subscription to Grammarly and study the changes they suggest. If you continue to use Grammarly as intended, it will force you to start thinking about how you're communicating, and for me, I wrote in more ambiguity than I thought. It wasn't as clear as I thought. Also, as a practice, any word that you come across that you aren’t familiar with, don’t just ignore it… Look it up! Not in the Oxford (Google) but in Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster’s word requirements are much stricter, and Merriam-Webster should be your go-to. If the definition doesn’t fit the context, you can try that word on Urban Dictionary, but never let a sentence go by that you didn’t comprehend.

As my challenge, I will give you a single magic question to ask others to jump-start your soft skills journey.

"How did you come to that conclusion?"

Sit for a minute and think about how impactful that would have been in resolving your last misunderstanding and how often you or someone you know has been misunderstood.

Don’t breeze over these suggestions. No one wants to hear that networking and understanding are the most essential skills, but they are true, and the time spent studying them will surely pay off.

Take your time learning how computers and SOC analysts talk by reading and writing, and remember to ask the magic question every time to ensure you've understood.

Communication is a grossly undervalued skill among tech geeks.