Certified, Hired, and Recharged - A Life Update

It's been quite a while since my last post, and this time the silence was actually a deliberate one.

I used the entire month of July to completely switch off. After two years of running an apprenticeship, a full time job, and cybersecurity learning in parallel, my body and my head basically forced me to take a step back. No labs, no writing, no TryHackMe, no late evenings researching random topics like I usually do. Just recovering from a stress level that had been building up quietly for far too long, without me really admitting it to myself along the way.

Looking back now, I think that break was overdue by several months, not just a few weeks. Two years of double workload sounds manageable on paper, but living through it day by day is a different thing entirely. There is always another exam coming up, another module to finish, another evening that should be spent studying instead of resting. At some point that constant low level pressure just accumulates, and July was the first time in a long while where I actually let myself stop carrying it.

But there is a lot to catch up on, so let's start from the beginning.

I successfully completed my apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration, finishing with an overall grade of 2.

The written exams were okay, but honestly not what I had hoped for. One of them didn't go as well as it should have. I won't pretend that was purely bad luck, but the timing around it definitely didn't help. I was sick during that period, dealt with a death in my family, and had to fly abroad on short notice, all of that happening right before the exam. It's the kind of situation where you sit in the exam room knowing full well that your head simply isn't where it needs to be, and there isn't much you can do about it in that moment except push through anyway. Looking back, I'm still satisfied with how I managed to hold everything together during that stretch, even if the result on that one exam wasn't quite what I had aimed for.

The oral exam and my final project told a completely different story.

Both went really well. My project was well received by the committee, and my presentation went smoothly from start to finish, no major stumbles, no awkward silences, just a clear and confident walkthrough of everything I had built and documented over the previous months. I ended up with a grade of 1 for that part, along with some genuinely nice feedback from the examiners afterwards. That felt good, especially after everything that led up to it. After two years of work, it was a solid way to close out the formal part of the apprenticeship.

On top of that, I got news I had been hoping for from my internship company.

I was officially taken on as a full time employee starting on the first of August. No more apprentice status, no more probationary treatment, just a regular position on the team. I'm now a fully qualified colleague, and it already shows in the day to day work.

I have already been assigned my own customers, and I'm allowed to administer their systems directly, still under the supervision of the senior system administrators, but the responsibility is real. Tickets land on my desk, changes go through my hands, and decisions that used to be double checked by someone else are increasingly just mine to make. It's a strange feeling to be trusted with actual infrastructure this early, but it's exactly the kind of step I wanted. Being retained also means I get to keep building practical experience without a gap, and in this field, that experience is probably the single most valuable thing you can have, far more valuable long term than any single certificate.

So overall, the professional side of things could hardly have worked out better.

Besides all of that, I also want to give a short update on the cybersecurity side, since that's usually what this blog is about.

Honestly, I used July almost entirely to disconnect from it. Between the heat, the free time, and just wanting to recover from two years of double workload, I let cybersecurity rest for a bit. No CTF rooms, no research evenings, nothing. For the first time in a long while, evenings were just evenings again, without that background feeling of guilt for not opening a lab.

That is about to change again.

I already have the two TryHackMe certifications I mentioned a while back, SEC0 and SEC1, and I plan to actually work through them properly over the coming weeks and months instead of letting them sit there unused. Rather than jumping straight back into advanced material, I want to start small again, going through a few CTF rooms and general refreshers to get back into the right mindset before pushing further into anything more complex. Two months away from the material is not a huge amount of time, but skills like enumeration, methodology and just staying sharp under pressure fade quicker than you would think if you don't keep them warm.

So this was mostly meant as a short life update, and a way of saying that I'm still here.

I'm qualified now. I'm employed. I'm rested for the first time in two years. And I'm motivated as ever to get back into the next phase of my cybersecurity journey, this time as a fully trained IT specialist rather than an apprentice, with a lot more practical experience behind me and, hopefully, a bit more balance going forward.