"Cybersecurity" is too general. Do you want to respond to incidents, do offensive security, vuln mgmt, vuln research, exploit dev, appsec, netsec,websec,cloudsec, setup systems for a security team or setup systems for product team with a sec speciality in their devsecops,etc...<p>But I gotta say, your background is best suited to focus on appsec (secure code writing) or seceng/devsecops type person. Your masters I am afraid is near useless (having worked with several masters holders), I might even make a good bet your security+ will be more valuable.<p>There are many certs depending on your goal and they all have value depending on where you apply. OSCP will impress anyone for entry level of anything. But imho, sec+ and cysa+ give you enough of a taste to keep you well rounded on a lot of things. The public secret is that you should get an employer that would pay a ton of money into sans certs afer that unless you end up in appsec, devsecops/seceng,vulnmgmt. Despite what edgelords say, you do learn quite a bit from difficult and lab intensive certs.<p>College grads and the masters holders I worked with severly lacked a hacker mindset. I think OSCP might help you with that tbh. You can't think like you are solving a programming problem or working on a coding/IT project. What you think you know in many ways will hurt you, which is one reason I am glad you are taking an entry level cert like sec+.<p>Just make sure you actually like security stuff, if not I highly recommend doing appsec/devsecops stuff so you are still in familiar territory.<p>There is a lot of work in security you don't hear much about where most people don't know how to write any code. And there are jobs where you work with assemly every day (and they pay shit from what I have seen unless your talent is top tier), there is a lot of variety. But the fundamental remains, that everyone in security has to know how threat actors work and think, security exists because bad people do, that's what it's all about at its root, not technical things.<p>Entry level jobs will be easy to get with just your background but in my observation, entry level is entry level, you gotta take somewhat of a crappy pay (relative to tech pay) and then after like a year your pay can improve when you have proven yourself a bit.<p>A lot of the stuff I do would probably be an unbearable burden if I didn't genuinely enjoy it. I work with people whose family gets in the way (spending time with them) or they do ok but do sort of the minimum with a lot of complaining because they're just there for the pay understandable, a job is a job, but they're not having fun at all.<p>Hooe that helped.<p>Oh, and stay away from startups and such and avoid ec-council certs like cancer. CTFs take a lot of time, I wouldn't waste my time on them in your position, they won't actually help you get a job unless it is a really competitive junior pentester gig and it's a tiebreaker or something.