Woking College - My Cyber Security Career Journey
Posted on 03 December 2025
I was invited back to Woking College to give a talk to students about my Career, explain my personal journey and how to kick-start a career in Cyber Security.
This presentation was much harder to write than the more technical ones I’ve done before. It took a far chunk of time and research to go back through all my photos, notes and CV to extract the key points of my career and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I wanted to keep the presentation fairly light-hearted but also include some of the harder life lessons to help students become aware of them early and not fall into the same trap I did.
The key life lessons I have listed below:
- Be careful of Survivorship Bias, listen to advice but forge your own path!
- Trying/Learning weird stuff, took me even weirder places, never stop!
- Age > Time (When you a younger it is much easter to pick up new skills and you have more time to learn)
- “T” of Skills (A “IBM-ism” about developing a wide breath of skills “the top of the T” with a deep specialisation in some areas “the bottom of the T” Paper )
- Soft vs Hard Skills
- Networking! and Visiting events
- Be Open to Opportunities
- The Fundamentals rarely change
- You can do anything but not everything
- It doesn’t always work out and that’s ok
- Get Lucky!
My recommended Cyber Security Resources for students is below:
- https://overthewire.org/wargames/
- Reading Writeups, here I specifically recommend reading about “Log4J” considering how wide of a impact it had on the industry and how well it has been written up about. It also affected Minecraft which acts as a great example of how vulnerabilities can be exploited https://github.com/davidbombal/log4jminecraft
- https://portswigger.net/web-security - Just a fantastic resource for learning about web security.
- https://www.youtube.com/@_JohnHammond - Youtube is a fantastic resource for learning about the latest cyber security news and trends. John Hammond does lots of demo videos which I hope inspire students to research the tools independently and ack as a “jumping point”
- https://tomcope.com/projects/reading-list/ - My personal reading list across a wide range of topics.
- Kali Linux – Specifically downloading the ISO to deepen their understanding of Linux fundamentals and explore the pre-installed toolset. Kali recently launched a comprehensive ‘Tools’ documentation page, which is an excellent resource for mastering the various utilities available in the distribution.
Finally, I wanted to thank Kevin Wakeward and his own blog post My Journey into Cyber Security which was an inspiration for this talk and a great mentor for the sort time we worked together at Control Plane.
Slides
Available on Request.
Photos
