If you’re in the infosec field, chances are pretty good that you’re an intellectually curious person who enjoys learning daily. This is a prime industry for people like you because things are constantly changing — new technology is emerging at an increasingly rapid clip, and as enterprises adopt new tech, adversaries are quick to follow with new attack tactics and techniques.
Being successful in cyber security relies on maintaining your drive to continue learning and keep your knowledge up to date. Because cyber security is one of the fastest moving industries around, and it simply doesn’t stand still. If you’re not investing time and effort into learning the latest defense tactics or new skills, you are at risk of getting left behind.
Top Benefits of Continuous Cyber Education
While the benefits of continuous education in cyber security are vast, here are some of the top motivating factors worth considering:
- Grow your salary — The best path to getting a bigger paycheck is expanding your list of valuable skills and capabilities for which employers are willing to pay a premium.
- Specialize with new advanced skills — Learning more advanced skills will not only put you in higher demand to employers, but it could lead you down a path toward specialization where you can focus on the area you enjoy the most.
- Set yourself up to get promoted — The more up-to-date skills and certifications you have on your resume, the more valuable your skill set is to the market.
- Make yourself more marketable — A GIAC certification that validates your skills in a particular area of focus will add credibility in the eyes of employers.
- Expand your networking circle — One of the great things about SANS training is that it puts you in the same circles as some of the top minds in cyber security, which is great for extending your professional network as well as your knowledge by learning from your peers.
- Develop professionally and personally — If you’re not growing as a person and as a professional, you’re more likely to find yourself unfulfilled.
- Keep yourself sharp and healthy — Keeping your mind sharp and healthy is important both at work and at home; in fact, research has shown that education is inextricably linked to health in numerous ways.
- Explore new professional interests — Perhaps you’re a blue teamer who wants to delve into pen testing; you’ll never know you’re passionate about something if you don’t try it out and take that first step.
- Ramp up your innovation — Learning new skills and techniques introduces you to new ideas, concepts, people, and ways of thinking; in this way, training gets you out of your box to a place where innovation flows more freely.
SANS Online Training Incentives
If all those benefits aren’t enough to keep you investing in your education, SANS Online Training has a special promotion that just might provide a bit of extra incentive.
Now through August 18, when you register for any 5 or 6 day online course (OnDemand or Live Online), you get to choose one of the following: a 11" iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7, a free GIAC certification attempt, or $350 off your training registration cost. Additional special offers will follow in the upcoming weeks but act now to take advantage of our best offers of the year.
Some terms and conditions apply: Learn more here.
Making the Most of Your Freebie
In the past, we’ve shared advice from some of our star instructors on how you could use your free device in your cyber career (should you choose one of the device options). SANS instructors Mark Orlando, Justin Henderson, and Sarah Edwards offer some tips for turning your free device into a home lab or testing environment in this blog. And in this blog instructors Chris Crowley, Stephen Sims, and Ed Skoudis suggest using them to experiment with jailbreaking and iOS development, try out advanced pen testing techniques, and employ as a research system for hacking endeavors.
Looking for more ideas for how you could put these devices to use in your cyber career? Here are a few more ideas:
- Investigate and gain experience with tablet security threats
- Play around with operating systems with which you might not be as familiar or experienced
- Test out the exploits pen testers created on their programmer-centric systems
- Train on the go!
That last bullet brings us to the final point worth noting. This past year, SANS released the SANS OnDemand App, designed specifically for your training and certification journey. OnDemand training students can get it for free on iOS and Android and use it to complement their OnDemand training course experience.
The new app enables truly mobile training for anytime, anywhere access to instruction, quizzes, and slide decks. You can also download content for the duration of your OnDemand course so that you can continue to learn even when you don’t have an internet connection and are offline. Additionally, the OnDemand Mobile app lets you listen to the audio-only version of your OnDemand course.
