The Value of Cybersecurity Certifications and Training for Career Growth

The rapidly evolving threat landscape involves an industry-wide specialization in upskilling security professionals and keeping their knowledge up so far and relevant. Providing employees resources that allow them to refine their cybersecurity skills and knowledge establishes a stronger security foundation for the organization and is a validation for that security professionals’ skills.

Andrew Vinton, Security, and Network Architect at New Era Technology shared the worth that skills-building through certifications has had for his career and his experience with the Network Security Expert (NSE Certification) Training Institute’s eight-level Certification Program.

What attracted you to a career in cybersecurity?

My journey into cybersecurity was a gradual one, and it had been not what I originally expected to concentrate on once I joined the industry. After starting my IT career doing helpdesk support, I found networking to be both something I enjoyed and something I used to be good at, so I moved more towards that area. The company I worked for at the time was reasonably small, meaning all of us engineers didn’t have specializations, and we all aimed to become the jack of all trades.

As the company got larger, I began to specialize more and more in networking. This was around the time ransomware started to emerge as a dominant threat in the marketplace, so I took the opportunity to move towards cybersecurity as well. I found the mixture of networking and cybersecurity filled not just a selected need in our organization, but a growing need within the marketplace at large.

What do you do in your current role and what role did you have when you first started your career?

I started my career in IT by working-level 1 helpdesk support for an MSP, doing everything from building computers to helping customers fix their home WiFi. From there I just aroused through the ranks, slowly specializing in areas that interested me, before ultimately deciding on networking and cybersecurity.

My current role is primarily network and security architecture – designing and overseeing the implementation of large-scale networks for enterprise and government clients. I also do tons of general security consulting and penetration testing, to fill the gaps between projects.

What allowed you to advance in your career to where you are now? What role did training and certification play in this advancement?

Throughout my career, I even have tried to place myself in situations that have forced me to grow both my skills and my capacity. This has meant quite a few long nights, quite a few mistakes, and therefore the occasional faltering of the work-life balance. Completing certifications and training is just an outworking of this philosophy, while also providing a framework, goal, and reward for learning.

I believe that as an engineer, client relationships are the foremost important assets we will possess, and therefore the main value in certifications comes when building these relationships. When interacting with a customer for the primary time, building trust in your judgment and confidence in your execution can often be harder than actually fixing their problems!

Certifications give clients, even clients you've got never interacted with before, a baseline of confidence in your abilities. For an expert-level certification like the NSE Certification level 8, which is notoriously hard to realize, this baseline is significantly higher.

What led you to get NSE certification? And what led you to pursue the highest distinction of level 8?

As part of our organization partnering with them, Fortinet focused very heavily on helping us get me and my colleagues up to speed with their products and encouraging our engineers to pursue the NSE certification track. After I achieved the NSE Certification level 7, I took on the NSE Certification 8 as a private challenge, hoping to be the primary in Australia to urge it.

Fortinet - especially our partner manager Tim Fitzgerald - supported this goal immensely by providing training and equipment on my behalf to review. I can honestly say that the partner enablement of Fortinet in Australia is second to none. I would not are ready to achieve the NSE Certification without the support, training, and opportunities they provided.

Does your Fortinet NSE certification come up in customer conversations?

All the time; sometimes it's the sole thing that permits the customer conversation to happen in the first place. We’ve even had people cold-call our office line and ask to talk to ‘the Fortinet guy.’

Are there any other benefits that come to mind when you think specifically of the NSE Certification level 8 certification?

While studying for the NSE Certification level 8 helped me to extend my skill level in Fortinet products, I found that my skills and knowledge increased at a faster rate after I achieved the certification. Having the highest level of qualification means you get given the most complex of problems, and most of the time the buck stops with you.

This can be daunting initially, and it took me a short time after achieving the certification to be comfortable with this new reality, but now it's allowed me to reach a new level of confidence with the Fortinet product suite and within the industry in general.

What other certifications do you have, if any?

Often I might challenge myself to urge certifications for particular products our organization would be watching or implementing at the time, and sometimes I might just get certifications because we needed them to maintain partner status. As a result, I even have quite an odd collection of certifications, like an MCSE in Windows Server 2012, Citrix CCP for XenDesktop, and therefore the VMware VCP.

Do you encourage your team to pursue certifications? If so, why?

Definitely. My journey to NSE Certification level 8 and the opportunities it has opened up are living proof of why certification is so valuable in the IT industry. I am lucky enough to figure for a corporation that both encourages and rewards certification, so we have an honest internal culture of continuous improvement and training.

What is your professional observation about the cyber skills gap?

I believe the industry is approaching a crossroads. On one hand, the industry has been continuously caught off-guard by changes to the IT ecosystem like ransomware, SaaS, and COVID-19, and therefore the skills gap is merely getting wider.

On the opposite hand, governments and academic institutions have woken up to the present, and that we are seeing unprecedented levels of paying on incentives and pathways into the industry.

Whether or not these works are going to be the responsibility of the industry, and the way well cybersecurity providers can take the theoretical experience provided by educational institutions and translate it into real-world practical experience.

How well the industry is able to do this may determine whether the industry continues to stay on the rear foot, or whether it becomes agile enough to affect regardless of the next disruptive event will be.

Fortinet’s NSE Certification Training Institute is Addressing the Skills Gap

Just as organizations invest in enterprise growth, an equivalent must be finished with their employees. Certifications benefit both the worker and therefore the organizations as upskilling proves to be a needed practice in combating the growing threat landscape.

Fortinet’s NSE Certification Training Institute is comprised of the Security Academy Program, Veterans Program, and Certification Program, supporting security professionals, academic institutions, veterans and their families, and underrepresented groups.