S’porean Woman, 24 Is the Youngest Cybersecurity Engineer Who Failed to get into Polytechnic
source Christopher Tan
Carmen Lim first started working as a cybersecurity engineer in 2017 at the age of 21 and she was often mistaken as an intern. She said maybe because she looks young and due to her petite frame. However, she also notices that most of the time, because of her age. She will find preconception about her ability to work which hurt her feeling at time but she learns to put these aside and simply focus on her work to show that she is capable of.
Lim, said that her most memorable moments is when she is working with one customer where she was extremely lost at the starting time but because she is very determined, her client patience with her had really helped to build her up on her confident. She also mentioned that her career path is not always a clear one, as she was interested in the field of technology since secondary school but she has to give up on an Information Technology course in a polytechnic after having scored less that her desired grade for the “O” Levels. Then she turned to Institute of Technical Education (ITE) and graduated with a Higher National ITE Certificate in Network Security Technology in 2016 when she was just 20 years old.
source Tan Tan.
After she graduated, she sent more than 20 resume out and she eventually got placed at a digital infrastructure firm of a Network and Support Engineer where she was the youngest engineer there. Being the youngest there, which means the will tends to require a longer period of time to finish the same task. And she said that, her best way to solve her problems was using Google where she never fails to search for a solution using google.
Because of her hard work and determination, she got promoted within a year to Level2 Engineer which is a higher rank from her previous one and she can choose a specialisation in a product out of the many she were dealing in the past. She settled with the SolarWinds which is a network monitoring software that helps to detect and resolve network performance issue and then she decided to further her studies in Cybersecurity in 2018, which she go to study as part-time basic. She graduated two year later with a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity with Coventry University. And she chooses PSB Academy because it is one of the institution’s partner universities, Coventry University which allow her to take the modules she wanted to take and these are well suited with her interest.
Now she eventually received an opportunity to work as a cybersecurity engineer at Invetivo where she can use her specialisation even better. The latest job has landed her a 20 per cent jump in her salary too which she can go back to her school to pursue a specialised degree.