Transcript
Speaker 1: I will say, although they have been striped to not require people to go get degrees, there's been a little bit of power struggle. First it was certs, first it wasn't certs or skills and degrees. Now it's maybe going a little bit back to degrees because of I saw a post, someone take me another day Easy way that you can attain a cert in a sense has kind of devalued them. Don't get me wrong, you still should get them because they introduce you to the information. But I think that's when the raise why sometimes schooling can be a better route in the long haul. Yo man, isn't this whole tech journey really journey of life, your career? every different thing we got is going on a journey, man. When we're going through it or trying to get the destination, everything seems so far. But the time that goes by goes like this I remember, like yesterday, what it was what seven years ago, Yeah, seven years ago. I remember yesterday getting in my car coming to Dallas and jamming that views by Drake. That was like the really the real start of my career. The first two years was alright, But even going through all those different things just seemed like so long. And now, from that time, seven years has went in the blink of an eye.
Speaker 1: So I want to start this pod off with, like, if you're still trying to get to that level, just keep on going. It's not going to be easy, But eventually, once you get to a certain level and you keep on progressing, you're going to look back at it's. Like man, time went by fast. He was right. I'm so consumed with what I see on Instagram and Twitter and TikTok I'm just not focusing on what I want to do. So I just want you all to look into that And I want to start this pod off for you know my Patreon people and audio listeners. I'm going to start this off like one of the songs that I vividly remember. I listen to it all the time. I listened to it yesterday. I was listening to this album the other day and I was like bro, this reminds me of moving to Dallas And I just wanted to kick it off like this. You know, real quick, I'm going to get out some gunshots.
Speaker 2: I'm going to take everybody up. Let's go. I'm going to take everybody up.
Speaker 1: I'm going to take everybody up. Let me turn this up on the loop back so y'all can hear it a little bit better. So you listening to your car right now, what you're going to hear, rap to real quick, like what are those? Hopefully I'm coming on track sometimes through this little app. The music, for what I hear is not, which I hear it sound like a month. Turn your love and care.
Speaker 1: All right, but look, let's go ahead and get into the episode. All right, y'all? welcome back to the textual talk podcast. Well, i'm your host, hd. I'm a cybersecurity professional, career coach, content creator and much, much more. This is episode 91 of the textual talk podcast, and today we'll be talking about some topics that y'all probably would think that I'm against, but the main topic today is going to be about why college could be beneficial.
Speaker 1: So, if you're right now, if you're still with us on YouTube, go on and hit that like button, hit subscribe. Make sure you hit all when it comes to notifications so you can be notified of every time we drop something, especially for the pod. Now, if you're listening to us on Apple podcast, spotify, google podcast or any other streaming service, please like follow the podcast. Leave us a review really helps us out in the algorithm And if you like the information that we're sharing, please share it out to someone who you think may need it. Now, i'm a preference. This because I know people will like give me such a hard time to tell my education, and not education and preferences as well. People know that I am college educated. I have a bachelor's degree in computer information systems and I have a master's in IT management. Now I got those because I didn't know what to do at the time to get where I wanted to get. So I always tell people I'm not against school, but, as you can also see with the news now, with them trying to repeal student loan forgiveness and other stuff, where the price of school goes up and up yet they'll give you a whole bunch of loan money but it doesn't assure you get a job. You have to be so smart and strategic when it comes to that. But a lot of us don't know about it because, truth be told, some of us are first generation college students. So how could you know what to look for?
Speaker 1: But in today's episode I kind of have some points that I'm going to talk about why college can be beneficial to you and why you should actually go into college. So one of the interesting stats that I found and I also know this because I do work with a lot of clients some college educated, some aren't And I got this stat from San Diego University. I think they have like a program that's online but it says around 88% of jobs, specifically in, you know, cybersecurity, require a degree. So I thought that was pretty interesting because I will say, although There have been strides to not require people to go get degrees, there's been a little bit of power struggle. First it was certs, first it wasn't certs or skills and degrees. Now it's maybe going a little bit back to degrees because of I saw a post someone tagged me another day that the easy way that you can attain a cert in a sense has kind of devalued them. Don't get me wrong, you still should get them because they introduced you to the information. But I think that's one of the reasons why sometimes schooling can be a better route in the long haul and we're going to go ahead and get into that, so all right.
Speaker 1: So the benefit of benefits of college number one the first one is pretty simple, with checks of box for HR. A lot of people hate that if they don't have a degree they automatically sometimes get dismissed because some of them will say, hey, let's have a degree. Those typically suck. I've seen those a lot in sometimes government roles, state role, city roles, and sometimes they know you could do about it. Now it does help you if you did go to school, because when you go to school sometimes you're missing out on the opportunity cost of actually already having real working world experience. So it's like delay gratification. So that's one of the easy ones, it's a check in the box and it's pretty much one of the things that can still help you and not hinder you when it comes to your job search. Let's get it number two. Number two would be higher earnings. Now it says people with a bachelor's degree tend to make an extra 20 K. Poor People with a bachelor's degree tend to make an extra 22 K more per year versus just a high school diploma. For STEM degree holders, typically they're starting salaries are around 70 K. So this is one of the reasons why I do advocate for people to do, if they go to go to school, get a STEM degree, because these jobs typically pay more. They're regular jobs.
Speaker 1: One, because there's a need of them, especially when it comes to us. A lot of us are not in these majors. If you go into some of these classrooms, it may be one or two of us, unless you go to maybe like a HBCU, but for the most part, if you had a PWI, you know that's not a lot of us, and a lot of this is also reflected in the real working world. When you go to different companies. You don't see a lot of us on certain teams, so there's always a need for us. Definitely, get you a STEM degree because it will pay off. Maybe not in the beginning, now they average that out, so I'm not going to say everybody's going to start off making 70 K, but I think in 2023, that should be a standard at least, especially if you're going to go into all that debt. So that's number two about how your earnings and I know, for the people that are listening to watching, i know people that got a high school degree that made more people than bachelors of college on yada, yada yada. That is a deception to the rule. That's not the majority. We look at the data. We already know most people that are educated Ten to fair better when it comes to employment. I mean, that is true, all right.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I put down is networking, networking. Now, you always hit me talk about this, especially when it comes to your job search and about why it's not about what you know, but who knows you. When you go to college, you get introduced to many different people for many different areas of different walks of life, which this can benefit you when it comes to your job search. So I always tell people, as fun as it is, you know, you claim to be anti social and you don't want to meet people. Your absolute goal in college is to get out and meet people. You never know who you're going to meet 10 years from now, or go, try to work somewhere. And they remember you, or I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I've reached out to people on LinkedIn before. Some people probably reached out to me because of this, but alumni sometimes want to hire you just because you went to that school, you know.
Speaker 1: So it's one of those things where you're like, oh, i'm going to do this. It's one of those things where people try to look out for each other. They went to the same school and they'll probably say you know whatever your school saying was, or remember something like I probably would Like if I seen somebody came across my desk with, like a LA tech resume or university dollars, i probably would look into them just off the strength that we went to the same schools and I know the type of the caliber of students that come through there. So that's a big one I met. I didn't network nearly as enough as I should have, but I did always network, because people now will tell me I've always been there, we've been in person, have a good conversation. So that's one of those things, too, that people should work on.
Speaker 1: It's like skills or talking skills how to talk to people. It's very simple. You don't have to be overbearing, you have to do too much. You literally can just say, hey, how you doing All my name so and so, like for me or self, for Shreveport, where you from? Oh, my major is CIS, my major is this Okay, cool, you know. And then we might see each other in the intramural or back in the days to be the red tables and just go from there, just like you know, a warm communication, to where, eventually, if y'all get the hanging out more, you never know what that turns into.
Speaker 1: So this is another one Showing companies commitment, or I had I wrote down showing companies commitment, but maybe it's like Showing companies you can complete something, because most of us know finishing college is not easy. Now you do have some programs that are easier than others because you can just go at your own pace and if it's large thing, online, that's a benefit where you can just do all your homework when you can. But a Curriculum. You see that syllabus every semester, every quarter. It's not easy to get through so many people that start with you in that freshman year. That don't make it So I would. Is that pertinent personally? So the fact that you can do your three, four years sometimes it takes you a little bit longer than others, but if you can get through that, that shows them okay determination. They can get through a rigorous program and pass. That's really what you want to do.
Speaker 1: I tell people all the time seize, get degrees, now seeds. Don't get your internships, which I'll talk about in a second, but they do get you degrees Because after you graduate your GPA is gonna be less important unless the role is specifying your GPA. So I don't want you get hung up on your GPA too much. Get what you can out of school And go from there. Speaking of the next one actually is internship. So internships is big. You should be trying to get internships From the moment you walk on the campus.
Speaker 1: What happens is and I'm doing something different I have another younger brother who just graduated, who's gonna be in college this year, and The benefit of the kids now is he was in dual enrollment, so he has. I think he has almost like sophomore. I think he's probably almost like a sophomore, if not a sophomore, in college already, just based off hours alone. And So what I've been having them do is I'm having them do the AWS cloud practitioner or he either is doing Azure 900 Who, reason being, once he gets that certification and learns about the cloud, i'm gonna feed him stuff that he can work on that could be project based. So when career fairs come around, or now in the fall, when it's time to apply for internships, He has stuff on there, he already have a good GPA and he can get an internship. That's honestly how you do, because if you get an internship early on your freshman year or whatever year you're in, sometimes they actually to come back or you can go to different places And now you've gotten two or three years of experience just off internships to where, when it comes to getting you a job, you're good.
Speaker 1: I think that's the biggest issue that a lot of us face when we do some of these computer science or CIS Or whatever type of computer degree is like. If you didn't get an internship, you don't have experience, and that's the biggest thing that people run into when they go from college like man, i got all this stuff but I don't have no experience. But what if I told you There is a way that you can actually show that you have experience without getting the internship? and that's kind of one of the things I want to talk about. So the next one is like, what college thing gonna introduce you to material that you may not be familiar with and, for the most part, you can go with? like you look at your curriculum for your classes, for your major, check that out. It's gonna have all these different classes.
Speaker 1: When you don't have a lot of experience, you have a section on your resume that says related coursework. So those courses should be in line with a role that you want to apply to. That's why I say Please research the curriculum, because if the curriculum is out of date and those classes don't match up with the job that you want to do, it might not help you as much. That's the first thing. So, related coursework you get to do some all these different classes that you can take right now. The next thing that you can do that's pretty cool is Projects. Now most of our classes had these capstones, all these different projects You have to do where you have to get in teams. Please write these things down and detail them, because This is one of those ways when they export those soft skills about working with other teams, cross collaboration and having a project, or tell me about the time you have to work on this, this and this. Those projects will service that, and so if you can market those projects that you did, those will help you look very well when it comes to applying the roles right And also getting experiences. Now you take the stuff that you learned, those courses, i mean those, those classes that you take, that you took Projects and then working your own projects on your free time. So I know I'm asking a lot of you, but that's what it takes to be competitive in the job market, because sometimes, while you're in school, those people who didn't go the traditional route they're Labbing all the time and they are actually a little bit better than you because they don't have to worry about passing and failing. So that's one of those things that you have to run into.
Speaker 1: When it comes to this organizations So you had different organizations. You also have fraternities and sororities and these things are pretty big because these are some people that may have people in their network that have certain jobs where you may get first dibs at a based on your affiliation, and That's why a lot of people join the fras and sororities because of that, for also, you got, you know, the community service aspect of it. But for the most part I'm Framing this about how it helps you get jobs and not necessarily like the other part. But those things are big and huge because, like I was talking about earlier about the networking piece, this kind of falls into that to where if they know you okay, cool, you know you a Alpha, you a Q-doll, you a Delta, you aka, you is a whatever The, the person who is the hiring manager of Hooter, sometimes that that might be one of their affiliations or you might be you know they frat, a soror or some and They're trying to at least talk to you. I ain't gonna say it's gonna get you the job. Well, you should get interview right.
Speaker 1: And here's another one personal growth and commitment. Now talk about this earlier about kind of going through the program of like how hard it is to Graduate with a bachelor's. Just think about the growth you go through, going from a kid To a young adult. Yeah, i'll say a young adult, like for me, i think I went into school at 18, came out of 21. I Definitely was not the same as I came in, went through a lot of different you know trials, tribulations, and learn a lot of things about myself, i think I think that's one of those things, too, i'll talk about.
Speaker 1: If people Should go into school is the fact that you get to learn about yourself a lot. Sometimes, if you don't go to school, you don't learn enough about yourself early on and you end up learning that stuff later on, which Sometimes could be a benefit. Sometimes it just depends on how you are as a person. But you do learn a lot about yourself in those times when you're by yourself, when there's no one to tell you hey, get up and go to class, get up and study. Hey, do this, do that, go get that book. You that, that's all on you and you know. And so these are the things that actually can prepare you for adulthood.
Speaker 1: I've actually talked about this in other podcasts lessons about how college can prepare you for real life. So I think some employers may see people who graduated college It's a little bit more mature as people who possibly didn't go through it because they didn't have to deal with the same things Typing up papers, doing this, doing that, having these deadlines, you know, for, yeah, what? three, four classes, all these different things you may be working at the same time. So it's a lot of stuff that some people that maybe your same age don't have the same maturity level unless they had a harder life. That's what I was just saying. Also, you know a good one achievement You now can have BA by your name. No for me, bachelor's of science in computer information systems from Louisiana Tech University. They can never take that away from me, no matter what. I have that and I have a master's. And also, one of the things about going to school is if you do want to go into a management path or upper leadership, what do you want to do? most of those people have master's degrees, phds. It's hard unless they the people that started the company for them to ascend like that. Those are some of the ways that going to school can prepare you for success in your professional journey right Now.
Speaker 1: I want to give like a brief intermission right here and say It's been pretty hard, you know, for people to get into cybersecurity right now. And if, also, if you're not trying to go to college. I would suggest you check out course careers. Course careers has a tech sales course and, of course, has IT course by Josh Maddacor And I've heard great things about. I have a lot of classes. Use the course and if you want to learn some baseline IT skills so you can get your entry level job, then go ahead and look. Use a link on the screen Well, actually it'll be in description, you can click on it. Use my code, textual 50, to give $50 off your course and get started on your IT career today.
Speaker 1: Now I bought the intermission in because I made a post recently about how, when it comes to people trying to get entry level roles, specifically in cybersecurity, the remote roles are drying up drastically, and this is even for mid level and senior level right. So I told them hey, if you want to get in, some these roles are open because people don't want to go into the office. So I know it is. If you want to go ahead and get your foot in the door and you want to succeed in your career, go ahead and go into office. Don't be scared about going into office. Get your experience up and then, once your skills warrant you to be remote, you can go remote, you can do whatever you want to.
Speaker 1: Now I'm gonna go back to some of the bullet points. One of the bullet points I had was about school was that You still want to make sure you do your due diligence when it comes to curriculum, price, reputation, even teachers that they have teaching there, just the teaching styles. How easy is it? you want to do your due diligence on all that before you spend any money, because this is in a huge investment that you're going to have to pay back one way or another. So that's just me being honest, and I did some slight research for you guys. So I looked up last night. I was like you know what are the top five affordable bachelor it degrees? and this came from researchcom and I think they were basing this off a credit hour. So I'm not going to read how much it costs per credit hour, but I will give you the five universities also had this link in the description so you guys can check it out yourself. It's Fort Hayes State, lomstone College, lamar University, eastern New Mexico and Central Methodist. So those are the five It programs that are pretty much affordable when it comes to trying to get into college.
Speaker 1: But let's see I had some other stuff I want to tackle into. Give me a second. I hope you guys found that information helpful. Like I said, i don't want to seem like I'm always against schooling. I'm just really against being practical with your money and your time and how you can make the best of it. So I'm a person I'll tweet this a while back I'm a firm believer in getting your first entry-level IT role, then going back to school. That way you can get tuition reimbursement so they can help pay for it. That way you're not on the hook for everything. So imagine so here's a good play. I did the ad earlier for course careers, so you do course careers. So you get an entry-level IT job. Find a company that you like, do tuition reimbursement there. And, let's not forget, if it's going to be your first time going into school, then you also will get your FASTFOR, so you possibly get a PELL grant and whatever other grants that you may get to, where you may pay very low to little for your first bachelor's. So I just want you to keep that in mind so that you can just use all this information I'm giving you to the benefit.
Speaker 1: Like I said 13 years ago, yeah, i went into school at 2010. I didn't have all this information at my disposal. It was very gate kept. It was just hey, get tops. For those of you who weren't from Louisiana, topps is a scholarship to where, if you get a 20 on your ACT, that you'll get tops, and so that essentially pays for. I forget how much tops is a year, but it'll pay for, like, your tuition and whatever. Then it was tops. Get your PELL grant, get your GO grant. It was something else get a work, study job. But you know that I was in school for three years and a quarter, yeah, yeah, three years and a quarter, because I graduated in the winter quarter No, no, no, fall quarter of 2013. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I was there but I didn't really get any real experience. Like I had some projects, even in my resume class. They didn't tell us hey, for your capstones, whatever, use those as projects to talk about. So these are things I've also talked about on my you know five resume mistakes like don't make these mistakes video. So all I'm trying to do is give you guys information. I don't want you guys to feel like I'm just against schooling, because I know a lot of y'all say the people tell us not to get searched and go into school. They got searched and went to school. Right, i agree with that sentiment. But at the same time, back then it just was different. You had to move just their way. Now it's gotten a little different because people have been burned by all these people that tend to just think like they know what they're doing. So that's what I say. Now there are some other tech news in here that I saw. Let's see I'm trust if I want to put this on the screen or not. I think the biggest one that everyone wants to hear about is this Check this out Toyota confirms another year's long data leak, this time exposed in at least 260,000 car owners.
Speaker 1: Two weeks ago, toyota said it exposed the data of more than 2 million customers to the Internet for a decade. Today, the automotive giant said it recently discovered that the data of another 260,000 car owners spilling from its systems. Toyota said in a statement that it identified another batch of exposed data that was potentially accessible externally due to a misconfiguration of its connected cloud service, which allows Toyota customers to get Internet services in their vehicles, such as information about their vehicle, in-car entertainment and assistance in the event of a car accident or breakdown. The car maker said it learned a misconfiguration after conducting a wide investigation of its cloud environments, after admitting earlier this month that customer data was accessible by anyone from the wider Internet. Today, toyota said the newly discovered exposed data include in vehicle device identifiers and mapping data that is displayed on the car's navigation systems of customers in Japan, but that information alone does not contain location information that cannot reveal or identify customers. Toyota customers may be affected if they bought a vehicle as far back as December 20, 2007, and their data was exposed between February 2015 to May 2023. The car maker said it was notified with a separate apology to customers whose information was exposed. Toyota also confirmed that an unknown number of customers outside of Japan, specifically in Asia and Oshina, had personal information exposed between October 2016 to May 2023.
Speaker 1: I read that to say Toyota messed up, but it didn't specify if it was anybody in the US, mostly outside of Japan, some in Asia and Oshina. I want to assume that we should be good if you have a Toyota device, but you just never know. I mean, i always got to be safe. I've seen now the Toyota. One of their headquarters is actually in Plano, so sometimes they're hiring people. They just go through all the time of having contract people So I don't even know what they're doing at this point. Far as when it comes to hiring, like it's still contract people that got a solid team though That could be a rare place for me, it's like if all the people that are hiring are contractors, how do y'all get any consistency over there on your program? So that was one I saw. Let's see one of these other ones that I've seen. So I think this past week this was a big one.
Speaker 1: Cisa orders government agents to patch move it bug used for data theft. Cisa has added an actively exploited security bug in a progress move it transfer, manage file transfer, mft solution to its list of non-exported vulnerabilities, ordering US federal agencies to pass their systems by June 23. The critical flaw is tracked to CVE 2023-34362 is an SQL injection vulnerable. The critical flaw tracked at CVE 2023-34362 is an SQL injection vulnerability that enables unauthenticated remote attackers to gain access to move it transfers database and execute arbitrary code. Interesting. I'm gonna scan through here some more. Let me see. Those who cannot immediately apply security updates can also disable all HTTP and HTTPS traffic to their move it transfer environments to remove. You can find a list of effective move it transfer versions and fixed versions in the table embedded below. Okay, currently there are more than 2,500 move it transfer servers on the internet, most which are in the United States.
Speaker 1: Mass exploitation and broad additive has occurred over the past few days. Carmel Carl told Bleeping Computer, although many of this not yet know the motivation of the threat actor, organizations should prepare for potential extortion and publication of stolen data. Like I said, another day, another breach. This stuff is pretty interesting. I try to find stuff that may affect some people in their personal lives as well. I know I've seen one about scammers using government websites to try to get money out of people, but I don't know if that was going to be that good to talk about.
Speaker 1: This is probably an improv part of the last part of the episode that I'm doing on these solo things Talking to either potential clients or people that are currently in their job search now maybe like a tip every day. So here's some job search tips. I'm recording this right now. On Sunday, typically Sunday afternoon may be one of the better times for you to prospect. Look at Josh when he's about to, and then he's about to come on Sunday. So now, when you wake up Monday morning as early as you can, that's when you start sending those emails out to those recruiters And you just tell them simple stuff about you, like say hey, i'm interested in this role. This is direct. Send it in a note. I'm only saying it fast because I showed this on certain videos.
Speaker 1: But, like I said, it's super competitive out here now. Everybody's trying to get in and get out. What about you is going to stand out? What about you is going to help you get that interview? And that's what you got to think about.
Speaker 1: Right, if you are constantly applying to jobs and not getting hit up like just nothing's happening, then share resume. Come see me and share resume, even if I don't do your resume for it. I at least, would review it very quickly and tell you like off jump, yeah, your resume is not good. And also I've worked with people and I saw this video Like I was like why you technically shouldn't get like a professionally made resume. I work with people who've gotten resumes done by resume writers but since they aren't like tech focus or maybe not having a lot of tech resumes, they do not help sell the person that's in the tech role skills. Therefore, the resume still isn't a hit. The foundation and stuff of it is okay, but it's not given what it needs to when it comes to getting a recruiter's attention. So I want you to remember that.
Speaker 1: I want you to remember that you need to be intentional about your job search, about what's on your LinkedIn profile, about what jobs you apply to, about not just taking any job just because you just need another job. I want you to really put in the work. I want you hey, if you're looking at these job descriptions and you're, and you got the bare minimum skills learn some skills, put some money up, get a credit card, whatever you got to do do that to help your career out, because, as time progresses, a lot of the simpler manual, tedious roles that's out here. Those roles are going to be filled up by a lot of AI and other things, so you have to find out how to have a better skill set so you can always remain marketable in the job market. So that's one of the things I would just tell you.
Speaker 1: Don't like some of my textual tips for you guys in the job search. I mean, there's more. Like I said, i do have financing. I work with a lot of clients right now and I'm really excited because I've got some good clients and I'm hoping that everything works well to where they actually land something pretty fast And I think they will. We're switching strategies. I'm learning different things so I can help everyone out so they can get to where they need to go. But if you enjoyed this episode, please let me know in the comments. Please let me know if I missed out on anything or something that you want me to touch on. I got a banging episode that should be coming to you guys next week. I'm telling you I am applying pressure 2023. Ain't nothing you can do to stop me. So I appreciate everybody for rocking with me. It's your boy HD And, like I always say let's stay textual in and out.
