“How do I leave a career in healthcare to go into cybersecurity? I love what I do, but am definitely ready for a change. What kind of experience do I need to get? I already have a master’s degree so I don’t really want to go back to school for another degree.”

Remember: “The resume gets you the interview; the interview gets you the job.” – Heather Monthie, PhD

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, and welcome back to my podcast, my YouTube channel, my Instagram page, LinkedIn Facebook page, wherever it is that you are watching this video. So I am Dr. Heather Monthie. And in today’s episode, what I’m going to do is answer a frequently asked question about transitioning from a career in healthcare to a career in cybersecurity. 

So I am I’ve been asked this question frequently, but I just saw recently posted online, somebody was asking a question about transitioning careers from healthcare to cybersecurity and some steps that he could take two to make that transition happen. So let’s talk about it. So here’s the question, How do I leave a career in healthcare and go into cybersecurity? I love what I do. But I’m definitely ready for a change. What kind of experience Do I need to get? I already have a master’s degree. So I don’t really want to go back to school for another degree. What can I do? So there’s a lot of different things going on here with regards to if I were to help you in this situation, okay. 

So somebody who already has a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree, you know, there are a couple of different reasons why he or she might not necessarily want to go back to school to get another degree in cybersecurity. So say you have, you know, a degree and a bachelor’s degree in nursing, for example, you’ve got you to know, you got an RN BSN. And you want to transition into cybersecurity, there are programs out there that you can get a graduate program in cybersecurity, where you don’t necessarily have to have an undergraduate degree related to that particular field. 

But when you already have a master’s degree in cybersecurity, well, then what right? So there’s a couple of different options that you have here, you could go back to school and get another degree, might not necessarily be the best choice for a couple of different reasons. Number one, time, number two, you’ve got responsibilities, you want it, you want to be working, you don’t want to quit your job and go to school full time. And number three, you know, oftentimes, if you’re using financial aid, this is not financial advice. 

But if you’re sometimes if you’re using financial aid, you won’t necessarily be covered, if you’ve already got a degree. So it’ll usually only financial aid usually only kicks in to cover the next degree that the next degree up, right. So again, not financial advice, but just something to take into consideration here. So what you need something to get your foot in the door, you need to have something to get your foot in the door, right. So like, there’s got to be some sort of technical experience, some sort of cybersecurity-related experience, it doesn’t necessarily need to be technical, because there’s so much to cybersecurity, that’s nontechnical, there’s law, there’s, there’s, you know, compliance, there are policies, all that kind of stuff that isn’t necessarily super technical, right. 

So you do have to have something to get your get your foot in the door. So what I would suggest doing is going to your own internal IT department or Information Security Department, especially if you work in a hospital or a larger healthcare system, there is a information security team, there is an IT team. And so what you can do is you can see if there’s any open opportunities, open entry level opportunities there that you might be qualified for, as is, okay. So they might not necessarily, you know, need, you know, a degree in it or, you know, a degree in computer science, something like that. But they’re looking for somebody with your type of experience, you’ve got the healthcare type of experience. And one thing in particular, that I that I look at is something like health information management. 

Now, that’s not necessarily going to be on your information security team might not even be on the IT team, depending on how your your hospital organization is structured. It could be like a knowledge management department or Information Systems department. So we want to take that into consideration there. But the health information management is a booming field, there’s electronic medical records, I know a lot of people who have transitioned from like, they’re foreigners. They’re You know, they’re working shifts, they’re working holidays, that kind of thing. And they want sort of a 859 to five kind of gig, they’ll transition into health information management and electronic medical records. Epic is a big electronic medical record system, getting not necessarily working in cybersecurity, but you’re getting some of the technical side of things.

And so sometimes what can happen is the organization that you work at, if you’ve already worked there, you’ve made a good impression, you’ve got good reviews, all that kind of stuff, they may just move you into a position working in electronic medical records, and they might do the training. They really like to have people who have clinical experience who understand working with patients who have that kind of experience, and then they can teach the technical stuff. So that might be an option that you don’t even necessarily need to go back to school, that there might be opportunities within your own healthcare organization where they want someone who’s got clinical experience. 

They’ve got patient care experience, and then they’ll teach you the technical stuff. So that’s the first thing that I would do is check on that. Again, it’s not necessary. cybersecurity, but it’s your sort of your first step into getting some more of the it Information Systems, understanding data, and understanding networks and all that kind of stuff, getting all that kind of experience. So some other things that you could do is apply to work at your company’s Help Desk, sometimes help desk positions don’t necessarily require a degree, they might require some sort of certification or some sort of demonstration of some technical abilities. So you’ll have to kind of figure out what it is that you already know how to do, what is it that you’ve already got experience with? 

Are you the person in your family that everybody contacts you for help with things, you know, make sure that kind of stuff gets on your resume, so that you can talk about that and and share that information that while the experience you might have isn’t necessarily paid, you’ve got some good experience, and you just got to kind of package it up in a way that makes sense to the person doing the hiring on a help desk. So that’s one other area that you could look at, you could also look at some of the online coursework that’s available. Udemy has some coursework cybrary has a really good plethora of cybersecurity training materials, I’m working on some for my own website called my cyber Edu cafe at https://learn.heathermonthie.com not a lot there right now.

 But um, you know, building it out, just sort of as I go as I have free time, you can also look at something like IT pro TV, they’re more specific to IT training, and it certification training versus cybersecurity, but they’ve got some training on there. But getting some training on like electronic medical records, such as like epic, something like that, that’s gonna happen as an employer paid training, it’s not necessarily something, you’re just going to sit down and watch a video online and download epic and you know, do it, do it yourself on your own computer, you’re not necessarily going to do that. But other tools, you can do that, right. So if you if you if you go through some of these courses on Udemy, cybrary, IT pro TV and others, you can go through those tutorials and then go through them on your own computer, do the actual work, don’t just sit there and watch the video. 

But you actually doing the work doing the hands on skills, is going to give you that hands on experience that you’re going to need if you want to transition into a career in cybersecurity. So that’s where the next tip comes in is starting a home lab. So what you can do is you can take your computer that you already have, maybe you’ve got other computers laying around the house that aren’t really doing anything. And you can build a home lab, you can put VirtualBox on those computers. And you can install various versions of Windows, various versions of Linux operating systems. And you can work through some of the different cyber security tools that you might use in cybersecurity position. 

Again, take the videos, take the content that you’re learning, if you’re watching YouTube videos, you’re watching, you know, Udemy videos, you’re reading blogs, that kind of stuff, take it and actually try to apply it in your own home lab. And then from there, what I would do is take what you have learned from your own home lab, and publish it in a blog, and make it your own blog, don’t you can publish on other people’s blogs too, but publish on your own blog, you know, my websites, Heather Monthie, calm, you can just go purchase a domain with your own name, install WordPress, or whatever. WordPress has got a lot of issues. But you know, you can, there’s a lot of different tools