- Creating and tracking your plan.
With the previous exercise,
you could understand a little bit about what it really takes
to decipher or to digest some of the terminology.
You're gonna break down those terminology,
and you're gonna see that there are a lot of things
that you may know already, or some other things
that you will need to research
and investigate a little bit further
so you can gain that foundational knowledge.
Okay, that was just an exercise to get started.
Now you have to establish a real plan.
And to establish a plan,
you should have a specific goal in mind.
And to do that, I always suggest the use of SMART goals.
And the reason why SMART goals is it works so good
is because it's specific, it's measurable, it is attainable,
it is relevant and time bound.
That's the whole point of SMART.
Without those attributes, it becomes really hard
to establish a goal where you can
really track and see progress.
So when we say specific, what I'm really saying
is be very specific with your goals.
THey are often not accomplished because they are too broad,
and it becomes blurry with time.
You don't really know if you gonna get there or not.
So for example, after you finish the self-assessment,
you can reflect and notice that there is a lot of gaps
in operating system architecture.
So you may say, I want to learn about Linux operating system
and obtain a Linux certification.
Well, this may be a goal, right.
Is is it specifically one, a Linux certification?
Of course, there are many,
and you have to to select which one you want.
But let's say you select the system administrator
type of certification, just to really have
some knowledge in Linux.
Okay, you establish that you want to learn.
And as part of this learning,
you're gonna get the certification, great.
Now, needs to be measurable.
How you measure whether the goal was accomplished.
Well, once you learn the operating system,
what you can do is, well, I'm gonna write about
to see if I have the knowledge.
Because remember, one of the things
that you're gonna have to expose yourself
more and more is helping the community.
And we're going to talk about this later on,
but just want to put this right now is part
of asserting yourself in the cybersecurity field
means interacting with the community,
contributing with the community
by posting in forums or even write articles.
So let's say that you learn Linux,
and now you wanna write an article about buffer overflow
and share with some professionals
so they can give the feedback.
Well, you are measuring your knowledge,
because you learn, you're gonna measure your knowledge
by writing something that you learn
and share with others to obtain feedback.
That's good enough, right?
It needs to be attainable.
Look, I know that many times people say
your goals should scare you,
and there is a very cliche thing to say.
But your vision should scare you,
because your vision is that longterm thing
that you want to achieve.
But the goals, you need to break down those goals
to be attainable so that you achieve one goal to the next.
What is the point to establish a goal
that you're not gonna accomplish?
That's why I don't want you to mistake goal with vision.
Vision usually is something that seems unrealistic,
but you know that over time down the road
you're gonna get there.
Now the goal is something that you have
to accomplish right now, next three months, next six months.
And that goes to the next, to the last one,
which is the T of SMART, which is time bound.
We're gonna get there.
But you know that, right,
you know that you want to get there.
So create something attainable.
If you know nothing about cybersecurity,
and you say, well, I want to get
the most difficult certification in cybersecurity
in the next two months, this is not realistic.
And you're gonna stress yourself without any need.
So establish achievable, attainable goals, very important.
Then make sure that they are relevant.
What is the relevance of this goal for your overall plan?
You can have multiple goals until you reach what you need,
but what is the relevance?
Because the other thing is a lot of people start going
in a lot of directions, right, they start a plan,
and they get derailed to do other things,
because, I read that this career
in cybersecurity is the new thing.
It's AI, I need to study AI.
And now all your plan to become a security analyst
was completely derailed because you were
looking to the shiny thing aside of you, right.
So make sure that you don't derail your plan
just because there is something shiny out there
and you were not focused.
So everything needs to be relevant,
everything needs to be relevant to the ultimate goal.
And the last one, which is one of the most important,
is time bound, it needs to be time bound.
If you say, I want to accomplish this but you don't
say when, most likely you're not gonna get there.
And if you get there, it may be two years later, too late.
So I want to get there in the next three months.
I want to get there in the next six months.
I want to do this in the next month.
You have to establish a goal that has time bound
because if you are running out of time
you will know you can track that.
And that's super important.
Having a career plan is essential for your success.
It is really important, and not only the plan,
but tracking the plan, which is another mistake
that a lot of people, they do,
they establish a plan, but they don't track the progress.
How can you track the progress?
How do you know if you are going in the right direction?
How do you know if you need to make adjustments?
Because your plan needs to be flexible to a point
that if things are not working this way,
you may have to do something different
and then go back on track.
So there are moments that it is necessary
to make adjustment, but how can you make an adjustment,
if you don't even know if you are on track or not?
That's why you need some help of a tool,
like I'm gonna use that as an example, Microsoft Planner.
So you establish a plan, and you track the progress.
And this is just an example.
You can use any tool that you want.
I personally use Microsoft Planner,
because it's just easier to do it.
And I'm going to demonstrate that for you.
So you have an idea how it works.
If you have Office 365 and you go to tasks.office.com,
you're gonna land on this page
and you can create a new plan.
You click on new plan here,
and there are some templates that you can use.
Business plan, simple plan, or new blank plan.
So let's say I go to the new blank plan.
I can say, okay, this is my cybersecurity ramp up plan.
I can choose any, private or sensitivity.
I'm gonna say this is private, it's just for me.
I'm not gonna add to any group,
and I'm gonna click on create.
So I'm creating this plan, and now the plan is created.
I can establish and start working on my tasks,
or I can go and configure this schedule.
But let's say I'm gonna click on task,
and I'm gonna say this is study
to take Linux certification,
and I'm gonna set a due date, time bound, remember?
So now is July 23.
I'm gonna say that by August 23 I want to get this done.
And I'm gonna add a task.
And now the task has added here.
When I click on this task, I can change to in progress,
and I can add some notes.
I can add some notes and can I also change the priorities.
This is very important to me.
And I'm going to change the progress to in progress.
And I'm gonna say started study today, 07-23,
the first chapter of the book.
So this now is showing as in progress.
So there are different types of visualization.
This is the board.
What I see this, that it has the grid,
to where I can see the due date, which is on the to-do list.
And there is in progress.
And I keep adding new tasks,
and it's gonna show as in a grid format.
I can have the visualization on the charts,
just also track my progress and see how things are going,
which is a pretty good one.
Or I can also see based on my agenda for the month.
So there are mutual visualization
that allows you to see things,
to help you track the progress.
Basically.