Hello community! I wanted to get your advise. Context: I have a limited certification budget. I have saved for Sec+ certification. I ran into a bundle in Udemy that includes a set of practice exams and the Sec+ coupon for a price even lower than the actual coupon directly from CompTIA. Have any of you purchased something like this before? Is it worthy? Thank you for your thoughts

🔥 THIS WEEK'S INSIGHT: The 3 Mistakes That Make Your Lab Look Amateur Mistake 1: You built it once and stopped. The lab isn't the achievement. It's the tool. I see this constantly: someone spins up Wazuh, connects an endpoint, watches a few logs come in, and considers the project "done." It isn't. A lab sitting idle proves you can follow a tutorial. A lab with documented attack-and-detect exercises proves you can think like an analyst. The fix: launch an attack against your own lab. Investigate what happened. Write it up. Then do it again with a different technique. Repetition with documentation is what separates a tutorial-follower from a practitioner. Mistake 2: There's no README, or the README is one line. I have 200 applications. I click maybe 60% of the GitHub links. Of those, I decide whether to look further in 30 seconds. A repo with no README, or one that just says "my home lab," fails that test immediately, no matter how good the underlying work is. The fix: every project needs a README with four things: what you built, why you built it, an architecture diagram, and what you learned. That's the minimum bar. I've written full templates for this if you want the exact structure, more on that below. Mistake 3: No architecture diagram. This is the single most skipped element, and it's often the FIRST thing I look at, before I read a word of your README. A simple network diagram tells me in five seconds whether you understand what you built. Words alone don't. The fix: draw.io is free and takes 20 minutes to learn. Keep diagrams to 10-12 components maximum, colour-code by layer, and label everything. Blurry, overcomplicated, or missing diagrams all cost you the same thing: the 30-second window. 📰 ONE THING HAPPENING IN CYBERSECURITY THIS WEEK The skills-over-headcount shift keeps accelerating. More employers now report that their biggest hiring problem is finding candidates with the right skills, not finding enough applicants. That statistic should change how you spend your next month. Certifications get you past HR. Documented, hands-on proof is what gets you hired. If you have certs but no lab, this week's priority is building one project, however small, and documenting it properly using the three fixes above.

Hi all, I'm Meldon recent Computer Security and Forensics BSc (Hons) grad from Greenwich (NCSC certified, CREST affiliated course), with about 2+ years of IT Support Analyst experience at KidZania London. I've applied to a good number of cybersecurity and IT help desk roles, SOC Analyst, Security Analyst, IT Service Desk and keep getting rejected, even for roles where I feel like a genuinely strong fit on paper. I'm not sure where the gap is whether it's the CV itself, how I'm positioning my experience, missing certs, or something else entirely. Would really value a second pair of eyes on my CV and any pointers on what might be holding me back. Happy to share the CV here or however works best. Thanks in advance!

Welcome @Joyce Donkor to our growing community, you will find live Q&A sessions in the calendar, please check out Guide documents for all the skill matrices and templates and feel free to post any questions in the discussion threads, great to have you