How The C|CT Course Helped the Head of Cyber Practice (EY) Enhance His Cybersecurity Skills
In a competitive landscape where employers prefer candidates with the right skill sets, acquiring cybersecurity certifications is increasingly crucial for building a lucrative career trajectory in this field. In an exclusive interview with EC-Council, Tabish Ali, Head of Cyber Practice at Ernst & Young (EY) in Pakistan, shares his journey, learnings from the multi-domain course content, hands-on skills development, and the overall impact of the Certified Cybersecurity Technician (C|CT) certification on his career.
What made you choose the cybersecurity industry?
My name is Tabish Ali. I’ve been in the cyber field for the past 15 years. Currently, I’m heading a cyber practice in EY Pakistan.
Security plays a key role in every aspect of the technology industry. That’s why I just stepped into the security field and spent a lot of time in technology areas, starting with app development and gradually heading security practices.
It helped me a lot to build my critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
During the C|CT program, you learned many cybersecurity domains like ethical hacking, networking, forensics, SOC, threat intelligence, etc. How important is learning these domains, especially during the early stages of one’s career?
These areas played a key role because these are the foundation or the backbone of any organization that would like to build or strengthen their controls against cyber threats. So yes, I would definitely recommend learning those areas. At the time of initial career growth, it’s very important to learn it because it will give you a very good perspective on how you can establish good control, how you can establish incident response, and how you can establish your control against cyber threats.
I found very real-world scenarios and attractive challenges that helped me improve my hands-on skills
The labs were very detailed, and that was very convincing. For those who would like to build their foundation knowledge, these labs offered a lot of help because everything was well covered. The labs are very well designed and very well guided.
I believe that was a very good experience for me. I would definitely recommend it because it was very convincing—a good chance to learn something and explore and enhance my skills.
Which lessons or exercises did you love the most when working with the C|CT labs? And why?
Lab pertaining to forensics and data security was very interesting. I really enjoyed doing some forensic practices, having some PCAPs, and having some traffic and network traffic pertaining to the IT and OT environment. So that was very interesting for me because I haven’t come across such a situation where I had to perform some forensic activity pertaining to OT security.
The web application attacks or the web application part where I was identifying the vulnerabilities in the web application and with respect to OWSP standard or the methodology.
Definitely, the labs helped me a lot to enhance my critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
How have the course’s CTF style challenges/exercises helped you in the learning curve?
CTF gives us a chance to apply knowledge and enhance skills through experience. It gives us an opportunity to improve our critical thinking and problem-solving skills. I was able to improve my critical skills because I was performing or learning as a student. Because I learned a lot and got a chance to organize my critical thinking knowledge with respect to the domain or the target.
Was the C|CT course able to help you gain skills more on a technical level and not just theory? If yes, how?
C|CT has given me an opportunity to enhance my skills from the theoretical perspective as well as the practical perspective.
C|CT helps me more in a practical area to apply my technical domain knowledge and enhance my skills by performing some hands-on challenges like CTF styles.
Practical side had very good coverage—a 60:40 ratio—60% belonging to the practical side and 40 % to the conceptual.
Has the C|CT program made you confident to take on advanced courses in the future?
In a nutshell, those labs or those challenges and the exact experience of the C|CT gave me a lot of confidence to select more advanced courses, or, you can say, the domains, to move toward the advanced skill set. So yes, that practical approach, the very well-designed labs, and the practical hands-on knowledge helped increase my confidence.
I’m ready for the next journey to select more advanced courses and to enhance, improve, and organize my overall experience and knowledge according to the domain with respect to real-world challenges.
Have you done any other entry-level cybersecurity certifications? If yes, how different have you found the C|CT program compared to them?
C|CT has a very organized pattern with respect to theoretical knowledge and practical work.
On the other side, in courses from other vendors, there’s a lot of content they have covered well, but they don’t have any practical skills at the foundation level. So that is basically a big difference between the C|CT and courses from other vendors.
We do have a lot of resources to learn something new.
The overall experience regarding the C|CT course was an awesome experience for me because of the very organized content and a very good lab experience. To have a CTF style and performance-based exam is a killing combination at a foundation level because I haven’t found such a combination in other exams or from other vendors.
What was your favorite feature of the C|CT?
Data security, OT security, threat intelligence, security operations, and risk management were my favorite areas.
Overall, the course is very good.
What immediate impact did the C|CT certification have on the job offers and the salary raises you received?
I found a very immediate impact after the C|CT because, as a security guy, we have a chance to perform multiple project-based activities from multiple areas and regions for multiple organizations. Those skills give me a very good, very immediate impact on my life to perform my duties as a security practitioner.
C|CT gave me a chance to improve my confidence and enhance my skills in a structured way
Disclaimer
Views expressed in this interview are personal. The interview has been produced with the aid of a transcription service and may contain dictation, typographical, technical, and/or other errors. The facts, opinions, and language in the interview may not reflect the views of EC-Council or the interviewee’s employer, and EC-Council does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.
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