I’ve been in the process of making a career transition (promotion IMO) from managing a team of cyber security analysts to a security researcher/security DS individual contributor role at another company; I was looking for some advice on educational requirements and portfolio for these types of roles. Primary driver is getting into more fulfilling/technically challenging work.

All of the roles I’ve looked at thus far require a BA in CS; however, I have an MA in Criminology and a BA in psychology. I was able to get into Cybersecurity without the education requirements via networking with teams several years ago. Is a BA in CS a requirement nowadays to get into roles involving DS?

My company is currently paying for a data science bootcamp (Thinkful-the mentorship is the best part of the program) and I’ve been progressing through the program. I plan on leveraging the capstone related work in this program to start building a portfolio through publishing on GitLab, Kaggle and Medium. I was also going to set up a MISP (malware information sharing platform) instance, send the data to postgresql and start some modeling work there. Does this sound like the right path to building a portfolio?

These are the types of roles I had an interest in long term:

https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1591812/Security-Researcher

https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1578544/Email-Security-Researcher

Thanks in advance!