You’ll often hear people saying things like “I can’t stand death by PowerPoint”, and “I need more hands-on”, or “I want to go on a real pentest and see what it’s like”.

I’ve been teaching IT Security since 2005 and it finally hit me. While I was helping by offering hands-on labs, and no death by PowerPoint in my classes,. I now realize that in order for me to be a better teacher I need to offer a more complete training program. One that can accomplish the following goals:

– True Measurable technical proficiency
o Taking a student from little to no experience to a real technical expert
o Providing both the student and potential employers with a method of measuring technical proficiency

– Community
o Creating a community of like-minded individuals all focused on “the journey and the process” not the goal (e.g. certification, and degrees)
o Creating a community of individuals that share their knowledge freely, advance the state of the art, and improve the state of IT Security around the world.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to completely revamp Everything I do as a trainer.

Here are the changes that I’m making:
– Creating lab-based classes that cover the fundamentals that a lot of InfoSec students lack
– Creating lab-based classes that fill gaps a lot of InfoSec professionals have
– Transition to completely hands-on skill validation based training.