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Landing Your First Role

Getting the skills is one problem. Turning them into a job offer is a different one, and this site hasn't talked about it yet.

You're probably not applying for "Cyber Security Analyst" first

Most people's actual first step is an adjacent role, not a pure security title. Worth searching for:

  • IT Support / Service Desk / Help Desk
  • Junior Systems Administrator
  • Junior Network Administrator
  • IT Trainee or Graduate Program
  • SOC Analyst I / Level 1 (some organisations do hire straight into this)

This connects directly to You Don't Have to Start With Cyber Security — getting good at IT broadly and moving into security from inside an organisation is a completely normal, often faster path than trying to walk straight into a pure security role with no experience.

Your resume needs evidence, not adjectives

"Passionate about cyber security" tells a hiring manager nothing. A line item does:

Built a home lab investigating a simulated phishing campaign — analysed headers, extracted IOCs, documented findings. [Write-up: your-link]

That's what Build Evidence, Not Certificates is for — it's not just a personal-growth exercise, it's your resume content. Link your GitHub, blog or write-up folder directly on the resume. A hiring manager who can click through to something real will remember you over someone who just listed "TryHackMe" with no further detail.

Cast a wider net than you'd expect

Apply for roles that ask for more experience than you have, provided you're genuinely close. Job ads are frequently a wishlist, not a hard bar — particularly at the graduate and junior level. Being knocked back costs you nothing but a bit of time.

Get in front of people, not just applicant tracking systems

A referral or a conversation at a meetup routinely outperforms a cold application into a company's careers portal. This is the other half of why Find Your People matters — it's not separate from job hunting, it's often the actual mechanism by which the first job happens.

The interview

You will very likely be asked some version of: "Tell me about something you built or investigated."

Have a real answer ready — what you were trying to do, what went wrong, how you worked it out. That's the exact structure recommended in Build Evidence, Not Certificates, and it's not a coincidence — it's the same skill hiring managers are actually screening for: can you think through a problem and explain your reasoning.