5 Steps To Learn New Things Effectively

Teach yourself computer science, cybersecurity, or anything, really

Photo by Carl Jorgensen on Unsplash

Recently, a lot of you have been reaching out to me asking how you can get started in the infosec industry. You asked me what kind of skills you need, what type of certificates you should get, and which programming languages you should learn. But I believe that to succeed in the tech industry, there is no single skill that you really “must know,” except how to teach yourself new things effectively.

So today, I’d like to talk about one of the most important lessons you’ll ever learn in both computer science and cybersecurity:

How to effectively teach yourself new things.

If you are a student trying to become a developer or a security professional, then knowing how to teach yourself is really useful when you don’t have access to a mentor or an official degree program in that field.

And as the field of technology is constantly changing, it’s really important that you master the skill of teaching yourself new things so that you can upgrade your skill set even after you’ve successfully launched a career in the field. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Make a Plan

The first step to teaching yourself is to make a plan. Remember when you are taking a university or high school course, on the first day of each course, you always receive a syllabus that outlines exactly what you will be learning that semester and what the timeline would look like. When you are teaching yourself, you want to do the same thing.

In order to effectively teach yourself, you need to first determine:

• What are the topics you need to learn?
• What are the subtopics you need to master in order to master that topic?
• In what sequence and timing should you teach these concepts to yourself?

And as a beginner, this can be quite hard, because you don’t know what the field is actually about yet. So how do you go about making your learning plan?

Let’s say that you are trying to learn about a new vulnerability class: server-side request forgery (SSRF). How…