CTRL+ALT+DEFEND

Cybersecurity Career Roadmaps

Seven complete roadmaps, free. Each one lays out every skill, certification, tool, lab and project you need from zero to hired, broken into phases, with a realistic timeline and what it actually costs. Built by Marius Poskus, a working CISO who hires for these roles.

Pick a path

• SOC Analyst — Monitor alerts, triage incidents and hunt threats in a security operations centre. 22 skills · 6–9 months · ~£400–£450
• GRC Analyst — Map controls to frameworks like ISO 27001 and NIST, run risk and steer audits. 14 skills · 6–9 months · £365–£1,200
• Cloud Security Engineer — Design and harden secure cloud architecture and automate its guardrails. 17 skills · 10 months · ~£715
• IAM Security Analyst — Own identity: access reviews, least privilege, MFA and joiner/mover/leaver flows. 27 skills · 10–12 months · £480–£545
• DFIR Analyst — Investigate breaches: acquire evidence, reconstruct the attack and write the report. 32 skills · 12–14 months · £350–£850
• DevSecOps Engineer — Bake security into CI/CD pipelines so vulnerabilities never reach production. 27 skills · 12–14 months · £350–£1,000
• Penetration Tester — Legally break into systems, prove the impact and hand over the fix. 28 skills · 12–18 months · £1,870–£2,270

What each roadmap contains

Five or six phases from foundations to job ready. For every item: what it is, how long it takes, what it costs, and the specific free resource to learn it from. Plus the certifications worth paying for, the ones that are not, the home lab to build, the projects to put on a portfolio, and the realistic salary progression for that role.

Not sure which path fits you? Take the career path assessment first — it is three minutes and it turns your previous career into a specific recommendation.

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