How to pass any cybersecurity certification

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How to pass any cybersecurity certification

Certifications are meant to validate real skills and prove meaningful qualifications.
In cybersecurity, they often don’t.
Many experienced engineers understand the technology, work with it daily, and still struggle with certification exams that are supposed to support their cybersecurity career path.

Not because the work is hard, but because exams drift into memorization, UI trivia, and wording tricks that have little to do with real job tasks.

In this episode of Threat Talks, Rob Maas, Field CTO at ON2IT, speaks with Nicholai Piagentini, Technical Enablement Engineer at ON2IT, about how certification exams are designed and how professionals can approach them more effectively. The discussion draws on years of experience taking exams, building training programs, and reviewing certification questions.

The episode focuses on how well-written exams validate fundamentals and methodology, why poorly written ones create stress and frustration, and how security professionals can prepare and pass certifications without relying on memorization or exam dumps.

What you’ll learn

• Why many certification exams fail to measure real-world cybersecurity skills
  Questions that focus on UI placement, syntax, or obscure edge cases test recall, not competence.
• How to earn cybersecurity qualifications by focusing on concepts
  Understanding fundamentals and methodology allows skills to transfer across products and versions.
• What distinguishes a good certification exam from a bad one
  Good exams are clear about what they test. Bad ones rely on trick wording and artificial complexity.
• How to prepare in a practical, repeatable way
  Using exam blueprints, hands-on labs, and sample questions to reinforce the right knowledge.
• Exam-day tactics that reduce stress and improve results
  When to trust your first answer, how to eliminate weak options, and why nerves influence outcomes.

Your cybersecurity experts