The prerequisites to learning pentesting and the hacking skills needed to be a pentester have been covered in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6. Everyone who becomes a pentester starts a little differently! Some people come to ethical hacking from IT and computer science backgrounds. Others have worked in restaurant kitchens, schools, medicine, law—or even as Uber drivers or daycare workers—you name it, and pentesting is their first foray into IT! Whatever your background, you will need your own custom road map personalized to your skills and needs.
In this chapter, we'll cover doing an inventory of your current skills and perform a skill gap analysis in order to create your action plan. You'd be surprised which of your many professional experiences can be useful in your new career as a pentester!
Skills Inventory
To start the process of building your own personal education plan, you need to create a list of things that you know and a list of topics that you need to learn more about and then compare them in a gap analysis to build your education plan. Table 7.1 can be used as a starting point to take inventory of your skills.
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