[quote] Would you mind briefly explaining what should a person from one of those 100 job applications you received have knowledge in and to what extent to satisfy your criteria or what you consider a generally acceptable knowledge to get hired ? Are those “layer 2 vs layer 3, routing, switching, network principles, operating systems, application installation, troubleshooting, or hardware” the basics generally accepted or are they just what you see fit for your company’s purposes or how could you answer that ?
Thank you
Richard
[/quote]
Happily. And, thank you for asking.
Let me use an analogy. You want to become a heart surgeon. You hear that heart surgeons are well-paid, work to improve people’s lives, and the job looks exciting. You walk into a hospital and meet with the Chief of Surgery. You say, “'I’m not sure what your hospital wants or requires to be a surgeon. I imagine it varies from hospital to hospital. I like knives and am willing to learn on the job.” What sort of reaction do you think you’d receive?
To be a heart surgeon, you’d have to know things - typically by going to medical school. You start with basic biology, anatomy, chemistry, and so on. When you have built up that base of knowledge (similar to the base of a pyramid) you are then capable of adding on more specialized knowledge - surgical tools, suturing, post-surgical care. Eventually, you may be learned enough to contemplate heart surgery.
To understand what you don’t understand, start at the top and work down. If I put you into a chair at my company and say, “There is a denial of service attack on facility A and a ransomware infection spreading in facility B - what should we do?” you’d better have an answer. If you don’t, you lack the knowledge required for the job.
If you want to protect a network, and you don’t understand what a properly operating network looks like, you will never be able to do so. If you don’t understand what a properly operating computer looks like, you will never be able to detect one that is subtlety infected.
So-called “cybersecurity experts” are networking and operations experts who bring additional knowledge to the table.
Of course, if you are referring to cybersecurity hucksters and confidence men who are simply selling monitoring products and snake-oil remedies - that doesn’t require as much knowledge. (Like the consultant who insisted with a straight face that having a .gov domain would make us more secure and would tell people our emails could be trusted. And he continued to do so even after I produced emails we had received from compromised .gov domains.) Those jobs are readily available.
