I didn't think this needed to be said, but here we are.

Consulting isn’t, in General, Entry-Level.

Consultation requires experience, and experience requires time, knowledge, and specialization. Anyone selling “consulting services” without teams having the appropriate experience, is selling you snake oil. Pentesting is no different.

You're not just running tools, you're providing business advice on risk management and security posture to executives who make million-dollar decisions based on your findings.

Client Communication Skills

Explaining technical findings to non-technical stakeholders and providing actionable remediation advice is a senior-level skill.

Business Context Awareness

Effective pentesting requires understanding how security findings impact business operations and priorities. How can you understand IT business priorities if you’ve never worked in IT?

But even with business understanding, you still need the technical chops.

Deep Technical Foundation Required

You need solid understanding of networking, operating systems, programming languages, and security concepts before you can effectively identify vulnerabilities. This isn't about perfection, but you need enough depth to know what you're looking at.

Operational Security Gaps

Recognizing the difference between how security controls are supposed to work versus how they're actually deployed and maintained is really useful. When you understand how sysadmins, developers, and IT teams actually work day-to-day, you will expect their shortcuts, their workarounds, and likely their bugs.

Real Consequences

Like medicine, or law, pentesting has life-or-death consequences (for businesses) and requires years of foundational knowledge before independent practice. Inexperienced pentesters can miss critical vulnerabilities, create false sense of security, or worse, cause outages during testing.

Would you hire a lawyer with only 6 months of experience to handle your biggest legal risk? Of course not. You'd expect them to work under supervision with experienced counsel. So why treat pentesting differently?

For Junior Testers

Focus on building real IT experience first. Anyone telling you that you can skip the foundational years is selling you something, and it's not expertise.

The Big Firm Problem

Many large consulting firms charge premium rates while staffing projects primarily with junior resources. Clients pay senior-level fees but get junior-level work, and junior-level insights. This model works for some types of consulting, but pentesting isn't one of them.

When a company pays $50k for a pentest, they expect it to be performed by someone who can think like an attacker, not someone following a checklist. They're paying for the experience to know which vulnerabilities actually matter in their specific environment and business context.

The Bait-and-Switch:

• Sales calls feature senior partners who won't touch the actual work, or better yet, the senior partners aren’t technical themselves
• Junior staff spend most of their time learning on the client's dime
• Reports are templated and generic rather than tailored to the business
• Critical vulnerabilities get missed because testers don't know what to look for
• Clients get a false sense of security from a "clean" report that missed the real risks

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This is why the "entry-level pentesting" narrative is so harmful, it enables this exploitative business model where firms can justify charging enterprise rates for novice work.

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