Im not sure if your situation is “normal”, but it may be less rare than you think. Chaos can be a ladder, but it can also result in you just being overworked and making no real progress technically or professionally. Given the situation I would probably just look for what else you can find and jump on anything that seems promising, but in the mean time keep your head down and get your job done and try to make the best of the situation. Do you feel your situation is stable in terms of job security?

Honestly that’s pretty much all I used. In aCloud they link to some AWS-native resources, best-practices guides, etc… but I winged it from there.

Ah cool. I found it relatively challenging when I did it. I used aCloudGuru to prep.

niiiiice!

Yikes. Well hopefully you can get that sorted out. Best of luck!!

WGU is a popular option for school that is more budget and time-friendly. Have you run into issues applying to jobs that required a degree?

https://www.cisecurity.org/controls/v8

AWS has their own first-party certs if you want something vendor-specific (I’m sure Google and Msft have similar). ISC^2 has something too https://www.isc2.org/certifications/ccsp

Fair enough. Just remember, there’s more (a lot more) to infosec than just Hack the Box stuff.

Pure appsec certs off the top of my head… OSWE, GIAC GWAPT (and others from SANS), Portswiggers Burp Suite cert, OffSec also has a 200-level appsec cert. I’m sure there are other popular ones too.