Advanced Cybersecurity Career Starts With CompTIA Basics

Working from home on a hot Texas morning in June, Aaron Meimban, network engineer at Simpson Strong-Tie, had just finished a meeting and was already coming up with ways on how to solve – or preempt – a range of tech and cybersecurity problems on the other side of the world.

The company is implementing a new data center in Vietnam, and Meimban is working with other network engineers to create an orderly plan for a secure, well-functioning implementation. On top of that, in his day-to-day, he writes app-based network documentation and diagrams. On occasion, he receives emails asking him to monitor the company’s network while working on his other projects.

While Meimban is handling some heavily technical tasks these days, he got his start – like many – as a kid fascinated with technology. Growing up in the Philippines in an era of shifting tech needs, the path to a career was not always straightforward. But CompTIA certifications set the baseline for building his knowledge throughout his career, even early on when taking an exam was out of reach.

From Childhood Gamer to Novice IT Pro

At the age of 10, in the city of Manila, Meimban discovered the simple computer games that came installed on his home PC. He immediately fell in love. As he grew older and moved on to more advanced gaming fare, his Windows 95 machine was aging, too, and getting taxed by the increasing demands of new games. Facing a system crash while he was playing one day, Meimban took his PC down to the local computer repair shop.

The guys at the shop informed him that his computer was going to need some upgrades, a new motherboard, more memory, a better video card and so on. As they pursued the improvements, Meimban watched. This was not his last visit to the repair shop. Each time he dropped in, he would watch them take apart, diagnose and repair computers.

“I realized then that I wanted to fix my own computer someday,” Meimban said.

A few years later, Meimban took a short technical course and got his first job as a computer repair technician. But for Meimban, basic repairs were just a start.

CompTIA Certification Objectives: An Effective Learning Tool

Meimban began pursuing an electronics communication engineer degree. In the Philippines at the time, such a degree was the sign of a top-of-the-line tech education. The program’s curriculum, though, was geared toward the foundations of traditional telecom and electrical engineering, and it was less applicable to facilitating networked connectivity. The online world was becoming more central to doing business on the islands, and so the jobs that Meimban was interviewing for were looking for candidates more familiar with setting up switches and routing packets than candidates with experience soldering circuit boards.

Meimban had heard about CompTIA in school. He knew that CompTIA certifications confirmed the enterprise tech skills most professionals needed in the field. And while he did not have the money to take the certification exam, getting his knowledge certification-ready would mean building his ability to do the job. Meimban went on YouTube and used available test preparation videos to get himself up to speed.

“I just studied the materials because CompTIA Network+ has the basics of networking,” Meimban said. “It was a big help to my career because I really didn’t know anything about networking at that time.”

In 2011, Meimban began as a network engineer. It was his first enterprise-level tech job. Building his skills as he moved up the career ladder, his work on networks flowed naturally into securing them. In 2016, he took on a job as a senior security engineer. There, he picked up a slew of new skills pertaining to finding and repairing network vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity was emerging as the path he wanted to head down. With a big life change coming, though, reaching the level of career stability he was looking for would require serious work.

A Challenging Stateside Relocation

In 2018, Meimban’s wife, a nurse, got a job at a hospital in Virginia. On moving to the United States, Meimban found that his experience working on networks in the Philippines was not as highly regarded by U.S. employers as he would have hoped.

Without the precise experience that people were looking for on his resume, it took Meimban between six and eight months to lock down his first job in the United States. When he got his foot in the door, he was finally able to demonstrate his ability and began climbing the job ladder again. In two years, he relocated to Indiana. At that time, he began considering how he could both increase his compensation and verify his skills to any employer, no matter where he was.

Meimban thought of CompTIA.

CompTIA: A Foundation for Success at Any Level

Having worked in cybersecurity for a number of years, Meimban was in a much better financial position than at the start of his career in the Philippines. Now, rather than just learning exam objectives, he could afford to take the exam – and benefit from earning and holding the certification. It was possible, but not easy.

Meimban wanted the high-level CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+) certification. He added up to three hours of study per day to his already packed work schedule and studied for a full three months. The study paid off, and in June of 2020, he passed the CASP+ certification exam.

Today, with CASP+ in hand, Meimban takes on business-critical challenges like building an overseas data center. He is confident that he’s guiding the process in the right direction and keeping cybersecurity in mind at every step. Meimban sees cybersecurity as a wide-open field, for himself and everyone, with opportunities available beyond what people may realize. He advises those who want to build a high-level cybersecurity career to dig into the technology, get their hands dirty and – most of all – understand the basics.

“CompTIA certifications are absolutely worth it,” Meimban said. “They build the basic foundation. You can’t go on to advanced subjects without learning the basics. That is what CompTIA certs are for.”

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Matthew Stern is a freelance writer based in Chicago who covers information technology, retail and various other topics and industries.