I was sitting in my car between delivery runs in Sydney, scrolling through job listings on my phone, when it hit me: I cannot do this for the next twenty years.
Not because delivery driving is bad work. It pays the bills. But I kept running the maths in my head — the wear on the car, the unpredictable hours, the ceiling that never moves. I had the same feeling in aged care in Adelaide. And before that, in real estate back in India. Good jobs, honest work, but none of them felt like they were building towards something bigger.
That evening, I started researching. Not casually — properly. "Career change in your forties." "High demand industries Australia." "Jobs that don't need a degree." The same field kept surfacing in every list, every Reddit thread, every career advice article: cybersecurity.
Entry-level cybersecurity analysts in Australia earn AUD $60,000–$85,000 (source: PayScale Australia, as of 2024). The ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study reported a global gap of approximately 4 million professionals. The industry is not turning people away — it is actively looking for them.
But the money wasn't what hooked me. Cybersecurity is about protecting people. Coming from aged care, where the entire job was protecting vulnerable people, that resonated with me more than I expected.
When I started looking for learning resources, I found thousands — YouTube playlists, Reddit recommendations, TryHackMe, scattered blog posts. The quantity was overwhelming, but the structure was missing. Every resource assumed you already had an IT background. Nothing was written for someone like me — someone starting from absolute zero.
I didn't come to this alone. My husband, Mohit Saxena, has been a software engineer for over 17 years — at Cisco, Adobe, Capgemini, UNSW, and Australian government agencies. Living with an engineer all these years, I watched technology transform careers around me. When I decided to make the switch in my forties, he didn't just encourage me — he sat down with me at the kitchen table and started teaching. Networking concepts, security architecture, how to think about systems. He became my first teacher, and this project became something we build together.
So I built MyCyberSecurityPath.com — the guide I wish I'd found when I started. A structured, free curriculum starting from absolute zero, with study guides that Mohit and I develop side by side: I research and write from the career changer's perspective, he brings the engineering experience. No assumptions about prior IT knowledge. No gatekeeping. Just the clearest path we can build.
