Has anyone made a career pivot? If so, how old were you when you made it?
@BruteNerd I used to bounce between IT and development, but that's the largest pivot I've done. Well, I spent a year doing Quality Assurance, but WOW did I suck at that. It was probably because I hated it with the fire of a thousand burning suns. Ran back to IT pretty quick after that.
@mike
I am. Right now I would consider myself an IT generalist but I want to find a solo to drill down into a bit so I am looking at security. I keep up on a lot of security issues but I am having a hard time trying to figure which way to go and are 36 I am hoping I'm not too old to make this pivot.
@BruteNerd You're not too old. If you're thinking about going that route, you might want to talk to @kev to see what they're going to be expecting. It's what he does when he's not admining Fosstodon.
I've been really interested in machine learning and AI lately, and I've been thinking of putting more of my time and attention into it. It's a fascinating area of study. Also, I'm older than you by a fair bit, and I don't think I'm too old to pivot into that kind of field.
@BruteNerd as @mike said, I work in InfoSec. Like you I pivoted (kind of) a few years back. I was an IT generalist too, then moved in to networking and security around 8 years ago. I've since moved away from networking and now work solely in security.
Is there a particular part of security you'd like to go in to? Also, no, you're not too old.
@BruteNerd everyone wants to go in to either pen testing, or red team when they start out, as it's seen as the coolest/most interesting roles. They're also the most difficult to do well.
There are so many different jobs out there in InfoSec. Data/event analysis (zzzzzz), cyber threat Intel, malware analysis, dim/dar, incident response, network security, threat hunting, pen testing, red team. The list almost endless.
Good luck!
@kev Thanks. I'm just trying to researching different fields to see which one sounds the most exciting.
@mike @BruteNerd I did a stint at QA, but it was monitoring call center techs. Here is my pivot history w/ approximate ages:
20: 1981-1988 - anything/everything
27: 1988-1994 - secretary
34: 1995-2000 - call center for Internet co.'s
40: 2001-2011 - Desktop support/I.T.
53: 2014-2015 - freelance front-end web dev
55: 2015-2017 - Desktop support/I.T.
@BruteNerd Are you thinking of pivoting?