It would sure make things simpler if there were one easy and obvious way to get a job or start a successful business in IT security. But, everyone has a different story and oftentimes people just ‘fallen into’ it. Still, folks who are starting their careers can benefit from seeing the trails blazed before them. However, every detail can’t be provided about the career paths of the security pros, but here are some best pick out of details that illuminate how a cyber security career can be built.

Teen Hacking:

Michiel Prins cofounder of HackerOne says”My best friend/cofounder Jobert Abma and I began learning to program together at 11 years old; eventually we realized that it was easy to make programming mistakes that could have a security impact. This made us think that other developers could be making those mistakes too, and we were right.”

They tested their skills on each other’s systems and on the internet. Their parents noticed this positivity in their work and encouraged them to start their business.

Going Legit:

Nevertheless, starting your own cyber security business in early age isn’t easy. “We literally walked around the neighborhood trying to find wireless networks to break into and would ask people if they wanted us to fix them,” Prins said.

HackerOne’s first user was the Internet Bug Bounty initiative, a non-profit that offers bounties to security researchers that help improve the security of core internet infrastructure and important open source software.

An Internship:

“I always wanted to be part of IT, though originally as a video game developer,” says Adam Leigh, manager of IT Risk Operations at MetLife. “I got the internship at the end of the university to support a consulting team doing a hospital improvement initiative in Doha, Qatar, I was friendly and volunteered to do all sorts of things to keep the team happy, and it earned me a full-time position at the firm. Then Sarbanes-Oxley hit full swing and I ended up an IT auditor.” he says.

Taking Initiative:

Chris Bowen, CSO of ClearDATA, began his career as a political staffer in the Arizona state legislature. After getting an MBA, he founded DirectClarity, a content management firm, in 2004. And since the company’s biggest client was in healthcare that meant interacting with patient data, and quickly getting up to speed on HIPAA law and infosec regulations. This was, it turned out, a huge market; in 2009, he founded ClearDATA, focused entirely on securing healthcare data in the cloud. His move from content management to security was complete.

The security frontier:

Dave Cox, CEO of LiquidVPN, got his first job in 1998, working in a Y2K compliance job at a large chain of banks. “When I was hired, it was because I had experience with Novell and Windows NT. It was not a traditional cybersecurity position—back then, cybersecurity was an afterthought.Most of my friends and I knew cybersecurity was going to be a big industry because of how vulnerable the networks we were coming into contact with were. So I always displayed my security experience at the top of my technical resume. I had four or five years of network administration experience before getting my first dedicated cyber security contract.”

Just like these successes discussed above, one can take initiative by his own to start working hard for building their career in the field. As the cyber security field is highly critical and has no tolerance for any mistake, one should work critically and harder to prove his abilities and skills in the market.