How I Passed the CompTIA Security+ SY0-701

Security+ is a cert I'd been circling for years. Every job posting wants it, every "how do I break in" thread recommends it, and every time I went to book it, something else got in the way. This year I finally sat it and passed.

For context: I've got ten-plus years in IT and security, most of it in incident response. So no, this wasn't a career-starter cert for me. It was a loop I left open way too long.

Let's be clear about what this cert is. It won't make you a hacker. It's a baseline — proof you know the vocabulary and won't be lost when someone says "check the SIEM for lateral movement." That sounds like faint praise, but half the battle early on is following the conversation. Security+ gets you there, and it opens doors that stay shut without it.

The exam itself

Current version is SY0-701. Ninety questions, ninety minutes, 750 out of 900 to pass. Mostly multiple choice, but the part that rattles people is the performance-based questions.

PBQs drop you into a simulation — match the attack to the log, drag controls onto a network diagram, build a firewall rule. They show up first and they eat your clock. So: flag them, skip them, do the multiple choice, come back. I burned 10 minutes on the first one before I caught myself. Don't be me.

The multiple choice is hard in a different way. You'll recognize every term. The problem is that two answers are usually correct and CompTIA wants the best one. Learn to read for that word — half of studying for this exam is learning how CompTIA writes questions.

How I studied

Honestly? Not much of a study plan. No textbook cover to cover, no video course start to finish. Call it one to two weeks of running practice exams — several different question banks — until nothing about how the questions were built surprised me anymore.

That's the whole method. It works better than it sounds, because the questions never repeat but the structure does. Drill enough of them and you start seeing the trap before you read the answers. And don't memorize ports and acronyms cold — learn what the thing does and why you'd pick it over the alternative. Every hard question is a "why this over that" question in a costume.

One caveat, and I want to be loud about it: one to two weeks worked because I had a decade of the job behind me. That is not a study timeline anyone should copy. If you're newer, get the content in your head first — Messer's videos, a book, some labs — then drill exams. Going straight to practice tests without the fundamentals just teaches you to guess well.

Worth it?

If you're breaking in without a degree or years of experience, yes. Cheapest credible signal you can buy. If you've already got hands-on years behind you, it's a checkbox — book it, study a few weeks, move on to something harder.

Just don't circle it for years like I did. It's a hurdle, not a wall.