Duration: 1 year with 3 months of full time training followed by on the job experience
Fundamentals that every cybersecurity professional needs
Select your career path
SOC (Security Operations Center) engineer career path trains you from a tier 1 SOC analyst level through an incident responder. You will be part of a team that is responsible for monitoring company networks and systems around the clock to defend against threats and will work to identify and respond to incidents.
Continue building on your skills in network traffic analysis to hunt threats and use the same tools you will use on the job. Analyze traffic in your cloud infrastructure and work in a team to defend your infrastructure. Perform Dark Web monitoring and triage SIEM tool alerts with ticketing systems you will use on the job.
Work in your team to identify Indicators of compromise (IOCs) and write Yara detection rules to detect IOCs of threat actors targeting your company. Write scripts to automate detection and analysis, remove malware from company systems, and continue building your threat hunting skills.
Work in your incident response team to investigate alerts escalated by the SOC tier 2 team and respond to live-fire incidents. Build IR playbooks and hunt advanced threats. Identify attack pathways to your company’s critical assets and build defenses against live-fire attacks from instructors. Analyze and reverse engineer advanced malware samples and perform forensic investigations.
The Penetration Tester (Pen Tester) career path prepares you for an intermediate level pen tester career. You will be responsible for performing internal and external penetration testing of a company’s network and applications. You and your team will use your skills to attack the networks of other teams using the latest hacking techniques. You will use your social engineering skills to bypass a company’s defenses without being caught and communicate the findings of your penetration test to stakeholders across the organization.
Work in your team to execute network penetration tests in different industries and communicate your pen test findings to the executive team. Hands-on projects where you learn to live off the land and not rely on hacking tools that are easy for the defensive team to detect.
Write your own hacking tools and use them to legally break into companies. Continue building your pen testing skills as your team hacks the networks of other teams in live-fire events.
Build more complex pen testing tools. Work in your team to perform web application penetration testing for real businesses and help them secure their systems better.
The Cloud Security Engineer career path builds your skills using the leading public cloud platforms, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. You will build cloud infrastructure and networks, monitor and secure them. You will gain hands-on experience with cloud secrets management, built-in AWS and Azure tools for security and third-party tools used by leading companies.
Work in your team to help companies migrate to the cloud and build, secure and monitor your cloud infrastructure. Manage and restrict access to critical resources in the cloud.
Scan your cloud environment with tools like Nmap and Metasploit to identify exploitable vulnerabilities. Write custom scripts to locate private S3 buckets and attack and secure APIs.
Attack and secure database services, like Aurora, with your team in live-fire events. Locate and secure EC2 instances, attack WordPress websites and learn how to harden them against attack.
The Security Engineer career path prepares you to design, build, and implement security solutions for companies. You will leverage your threat hunting skills to identify new attack routes and build defenses against them and develop information security strategy for organizations. Build business continuity and disaster recovery plans for companies.
Work in your team to identify critical assets, services and data for the company. Identify and prioritize risks to these and build a plan to manage risk. Develop policies and processes to maintain full visibility into your digital and physical assets and their interconnections.
Analyze incidents with your team and build detection engineering capabilities to reduce the risk to critical assets, data and services. Build continuous monitoring solutions to improve the company’s security posture.
Develop strategies to help companies recover and restore capabilities and services following a cyber-attack. Work in your team to architect networks for security across industries.
The Risk Engineer career path prepares you to build risk models and help companies remain compliant with governing bodies and lower their exposure to risk. This path can prepare you for a number of GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) careers.
Work in your team to help companies improve their external security posture and security score. With your team, identify pathways to critical assets and communicate your findings to senior stakeholders.
Work in your team to perform risk assessments and weigh the needs of businesses and critical operations against the security concerns and then effectively communicate this information to senior executives.
Work with real companies to build roadmaps to improve the security posture of companies, so they can reduce their cybersecurity insurance premiums and reduce their organizational risk in the long-term. Assess the impact of software supply chain compromise attacks (I.e.- SolarWinds) and recommend ways companies can reduce their risk exposure.
| Days | Monday to Friday |
| Time | Sponsoring company’s corporate hours |
| Instructor-led | 2 hours |
| Office hour | Flexible |
| Expert reach back | Flexible |
Review and prepare for your days objectives.
Participate in an instructor-led team session to understand what you’re doing and why it matters as you protect your business network from hackers, perform a forensic investigation or hunt for threats.
Learn how to problem solve in self-driven learning and project setup, based on projects allocated by your instructor.
Rest and refuel for an hour.
Immerse yourself in a live cyber range as you hone your hands-on skills while hacking into a company to steal data, evading a defense team in real-time or defending your company’s network from a state-sponsored attack.
Refine and put the finishing touches on any projects you’re working on that showcase your skills to potential employers.
Collaborate with and support your peers as you work with your team and instructor on task completion and integration.
Sync up with your team to prepare for your days activities and objectives.
Participate in realistic, team-based on-the-job challenge such as defending against red team (hacking) compromise.
Meet with your team to discuss your first challenge - sharing what you learned and the challenges you faced as you prepare to progress to the next stage of the challenge.
Rest and refuel for an hour.
Continue with your team challenge by responding to the attackers as they propogate to a financial data center and virtual reality servers.
Advance to the next stage of your team challenge by working through recovery options from a ransomware attack and reporting your results to the board
Recap the challenge your team faced today, sharing what went well and what could be improved through each stage.
Once selected, and depending on the apprenticeship, you will have the opportunity to:
Each apprenticeship requires testing and/or interviewing with the company offering the apprenticeship. You will need to abide by any additional requirements that the company has as part of its hiring process.
We begin the process of identifying potential career matches early in our gamified pre-apprenticeship program to help ensure our students and employers alike receive the best mutual fit. From Day One, you’ll work through a company-approved curriculum, build your portfolio, with align yourself to open job positions and prepare you for your upcoming apprenticeship.
For some companies, you’ll receive micro-certifications that align with specific industry roles. The micro-certifications are what we call “Time on Task” and provide training on the systems they require to hit a ground running once you begin your career. Time on Task includes time with malware, controls and systems directly relevant to your future career.
| Position | Cyber Career (average) | Programming Career (average) |
|---|---|---|
| Average US Entry-level Salary Source:Glassdoor | USD 70,000 | USD 56,000 |
At RapidAscent, we are striving to create an education that is affordable and attainable for everyone. In our program, if you demonstrate the aptitude and skills early on for cybersecurity, then we match you to companies that provide paid apprenticeships and cover your tuition for our accelerated apprentice training.
You can select to pay your full tuition upfront before beginning your cohort.
You can select to pay your full tuition upfront before beginning your cohort.
An alternate option to paying tuition upfront or deferring until after graduation is to pay your tuition in installments over time.
Your tuition payment schedule will be based on your cohort timing and selected payment period. One-third of the tuition payment will be due by the beginning of each quarter, so you can pay as you go.
You can also select to defer your tuition payment until after you’ve graduated and begun your career. This is done through a Deferred Tuition Agreement (DTA).
By signing the DTA, you agree to pay the tuition once you’re hired and making more than $50,000 per year. Payments will be made over time using 14% of your salary until the $18,000 is paid in full. If you do not get a job, you do not pay.
