Career prep for students

Jack Baylor
9 min readAug 11, 2020

So this article started off today as an individual student reaching out to me via LinkedIn asking for some advice. Soon to be graduating, they wanted to know if I had any tips for someone looking to enter any kind of IT role. Their primary interests are in Project Management, Cybersecurity and Networks engineering, and thought I might have some connections they could pursue or advice I could dispense. After putting out a few pointers, I realised that it would be a lot more helpful if I committed these thoughts to something less ephemeral than a LinkedIn chat log. I hope you find some of this remotely helpful.

Cloud of words saying jobseeking, qualification, undergraduate, masters, degree, technology, experience, home lab, trust
Word cloud including the terms technology, certification, job-seeking and qualification.

So I’m going to first start with some general advice that, hopefully, all students could potentially benefit from, and then in another set of posts I’ll look at the three subjects touched off in the initial request, that of Project management, cybersecurity and networking.

First of all, and this may sound trite but it’s often overlooked, but from as early on as possible in your college career, make sure to connect with your alma mater’s graduate networking program and start building connections. That includes both the staffers, part-time students helping out, and with actual graduates who are now in the workforce. Though you are not yourself yet a graduate, now is the time to start forming friendships, networks, and bonds, not later when you and tens of thousands of…

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Jack Baylor

I’m passionate about cybersecurity, progressing peoples careers, and houseplants | Twitter @2wiredSecurity | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackbaylor/