Background Pony #48C1
@skybrook
The small bright spot in all of this, if you're a bright young person in a First World country, is that at least for the moment, the insurance companies are making it prohibitive for the PHBs to hire H1Bs for infosec, or outsource those jobs to the Third World. For the moment. The TV news and the Internet social media influencers all agree that the field is growing and there exists enormous need for people with these skills, though people who get the certs and apply for the jobs don't all agree.
Nonetheless, if you have a basic grasp of certain very basic ideas—a computer is a very sophisticated, very simple-minded machine that carries out instructions sequentially, that information is stored in the form of ones and zeroes, and so on—there are free courses you can take online, in places like Youtube. If you already have a certain degree of technical knowledge, you will be profoundly disappointed at the lack of depth in the courses to get infosec certifications—I'm talking about Security+, CEH, CASP, things like that. It just costs a few hundred dollars to test for most of these certs, which may make them a pretty good investment, compared to what it costs to go to college whether you graduate or not. Whether they make you more employable is a different question—it's not an easy field to break into from the outside, certs or no. But if you enjoy learning how things work, it might even be interesting.
The small bright spot in all of this, if you're a bright young person in a First World country, is that at least for the moment, the insurance companies are making it prohibitive for the PHBs to hire H1Bs for infosec, or outsource those jobs to the Third World. For the moment. The TV news and the Internet social media influencers all agree that the field is growing and there exists enormous need for people with these skills, though people who get the certs and apply for the jobs don't all agree.
Nonetheless, if you have a basic grasp of certain very basic ideas—a computer is a very sophisticated, very simple-minded machine that carries out instructions sequentially, that information is stored in the form of ones and zeroes, and so on—there are free courses you can take online, in places like Youtube. If you already have a certain degree of technical knowledge, you will be profoundly disappointed at the lack of depth in the courses to get infosec certifications—I'm talking about Security+, CEH, CASP, things like that. It just costs a few hundred dollars to test for most of these certs, which may make them a pretty good investment, compared to what it costs to go to college whether you graduate or not. Whether they make you more employable is a different question—it's not an easy field to break into from the outside, certs or no. But if you enjoy learning how things work, it might even be interesting.