Achieving your long-term goals requires planning, strategizing, and execution. When those goals relate to your livelihood, it’s especially important to nail all three areas.
We’re here to help you specifically plan for your cybersecurity career goals in 2026. We’ll help you outline those goals, build a strategy for achieving them, and get the certifications you need to take your career to the next level, all in five straightforward steps.
Step 1 – Outline Your Career Aspirations
Your first task is to identify how you want to progress in 2026.
Where would you like to be by the end of the year? More specifically, what type of cyber security practitioner do you want to be?
Taking the time to think this through up front is absolutely crucial, in order to subsequently build your strategy.
Here are just a few of the cyber security areas in which you might look to specialise:
- Hands-on technical security
- Cloud or architecture roles
- Management
- Audit and assurance
- Incident response
- Consulting or advisory work
Deciding which kind of work you’re looking for up front is the perfect first step for guiding your thinking. Your choice may be based on a number of factors including; your prior experience, salary goals, and quite simply, what you most enjoy doing.
Step 2 – Choose the Right Certification for You
Once you’ve got a broad idea of the type of role you’re aiming for, you can decide on a specific qualification.
ALC is the longest-serving provider of cyber security training in Australia. Here are just four of the major certifications for which we offer training, in our broad portfolio:
- CISSP – The gold standard of security qualifications, giving you both broad and deep knowledge
- CISM – For those aspiring to be top-level information security managers
- CISA – If you’re aiming to become a world-class audit, control, and security professional
- CCSP – The most comprehensive course for cloud security
We provide Virtual Instructor-led Training, and some Face-to-Face sessions; all our courses are available for private presentation, and every single one of our trainers is Tier-1.
Step 3 – Build a Study Plan
After identifying which of the available cyber security qualifications you want to pursue, it’s time to build a study plan.
Begin by looking at the detailed overview of your chosen qualification. Some of these will have prerequisites. All will deal with a comprehensive and crucial area of cyber security. Identify which prerequisites you currently lack, and what gaps in your knowledge you need to fill in.
Now, you can build your study plan.
Find out when you can actually take your test, and therefore how long you have left to study. Then, work out how much time per week you can devote to studying, and how you’ll fit that in around your existing commitments. Ensure you’re being realistic here, so that you can stick to the plan for its entirety.
We should note here that simply taking a fully-immersed, distraction-free training course – like those offered at ALC – can greatly reduce your overall time commitment.
Step 4 – Set a Budget for Your Plan
Getting new qualifications will almost certainly pay off in the long-term, across the course of your cyber security career. In the short-term, however, they do cost money.
The cheapest can start at a few hundred dollars. Most vocational certifications will cost thousands.
This will be worth it, assuming you build on the qualifications thereafter. Obviously though, you still need to encompass these costs into your usual living budget.
At ALC Training, we are completely up-front and transparent about our course fees. If you require a specific type of cyber security training, we can even give you a tailored, obligation-free quotation.
Step 5 – Create a Defined Schedule
All the pieces are now in place for your plan. You’ve identified your overall objective, the specific qualification you’ll target, and how you’ll both achieve and afford it.
Now, it’s time to actually formalise that plan.
Setting the whole strategy out at the start of 2026, or early in the year, gives you a perfect, convenient way of looking at things.
You know where you want to be at the end of the year. You know any major commitments you already have. Work around the latter, in order to achieve the former.
Let’s say you want to achieve your CISSP certification. At the time of writing, virtual instructor-led training is available in February. You can book that right now, and still give yourself several months of preparatory study beforehand.
Afterwards, you might allow for another six months of dedicated study – to cement everything you’ve learnt – then take the exam itself in August.
Assuming you pass, you then have several more months to implement everything you’ve learned – and potentially progress in your career, thanks to your new certification – before the year ends.
Set Your Strategy Now – Reap the Rewards Later
Cyber security offers one of the best career paths in IT today. This certainly isn’t a secret however, making it a highly competitive field.
To progress through that field, and eventually reach the top, requires conscious long-term planning. While crucially important, this can also be straightforward enough to do, as we’ve outlined in this article.
A key part of any successful long-term employment plan is aiming to get the right qualifications for your chosen career path. This really can make all the difference in cyber security, and truly separate you from the crowd. And, at ALC, we’ve got a whole team of world-class instructors both willing and waiting to help you out.