Know Your Destination
Career Paths
Three high-demand cybersecurity roles — each with a clear learning order, required skills, and the missions that will get you there.
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SOC Analyst
Monitor, detect, and respond to security threats in real time. The entry point for many cybersecurity careers — high demand, clear progression.
£35,000 – £55,000
avg. UK salary
Required Skills
- SIEM (Splunk/ELK)
- Incident response
- Log analysis
- Threat intelligence
- Network monitoring
- Sigma/YARA rules
What to Learn First
- 1Linux fundamentals & command line
- 2Networking basics (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP)
- 3SIEM concepts and log analysis
- 4Threat detection & Sigma rules
- 5Incident response procedures
- 6Threat intelligence feeds
☁️
Cloud Security Engineer
Secure cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, or GCP. Design security architecture, implement guardrails, and audit compliance.
£65,000 – £95,000
avg. UK salary
Required Skills
- AWS/Azure/GCP security
- IAM & identity
- Infrastructure-as-Code
- Cloud compliance (CIS/SOC2)
- Container security
- Zero trust architecture
What to Learn First
- 1Linux & networking fundamentals
- 2AWS core services (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC)
- 3Terraform & Infrastructure-as-Code
- 4Cloud security best practices & CIS
- 5Container & Kubernetes security
- 6Cloud compliance frameworks
⚙️
DevSecOps Engineer
Embed security into the software delivery lifecycle. Automate security testing, manage secrets, and build security as code.
£70,000 – £110,000
avg. UK salary
Required Skills
- CI/CD pipelines
- SAST/DAST
- Container security
- Secret management
- IaC security
- Python/Bash scripting
What to Learn First
- 1Git & version control
- 2Docker & containers
- 3CI/CD fundamentals (GitHub Actions)
- 4Security scanning tools (Semgrep, Trivy)
- 5IaC & Terraform
- 6Cloud platform security
Not sure which path to take?
Start with the Linux Hardening mission — it builds fundamentals that are relevant to all three career paths. Then explore from there.
Start with Linux Hardening