Welcome back.
Today, I want to share the story of how I earned what I consider my first major international IT certification: CompTIA Security+.
Technically, however, Security+ was not the very first international certification I ever earned.
My certification journey actually started a few years earlier, around 2000, with a website called Brainbench.com.
At that time, Brainbench offered online certification exams for free. If you passed, they would even mail you a printed certificate. For a young IT graduate in Vietnam at the beginning of the 2000s, that was something completely new.
My First Encounter with an Online Certification Exam
Around that time, I applied for a position at a software company called RIM that specialized in Java development.
During the recruitment process, a friend and I were taken into a room, shown two computers, and simply told to take an online test.
Neither of us had ever experienced anything like it before.
Today, online technical assessments are normal. Back then, however, sitting in front of a computer and being evaluated by an international online testing system felt very strange.
Brainbench used a five-point scoring scale. As I remember it, around 2.75 was considered a passing score, while a score above 4.0 earned a Master-level rating. There were even country rankings, which made the whole system even more interesting.
Our results?
Both of us scored around 1.75.
That was so low that I sometimes joke that randomly clicking answers might have produced almost the same result.
The interesting thing was that Brainbench used an adaptive testing mechanism. The difficulty changed depending on how you answered. For someone who had never seen this type of exam before, it was a very different experience.
When we left the testing room, the recruiters did not even ask us what scores we had received.
While walking past the office area, however, we met several university friends who had already been hired there.
They laughed and told us:
“Don't worry. We had to take it four times before we passed.”
That was when I realized that perhaps the company was not seriously planning to hire us that day. Otherwise, asking two completely unprepared candidates to take that kind of test without any explanation was certainly an interesting recruitment strategy.
But in hindsight, I am very glad it happened.
Because that failure introduced me to Brainbench.
Three Months of Practice
For the next three months, I became almost obsessed with those exams.
Internet access in Vietnam was very different from today. I did not have the convenience of simply opening a laptop at home and studying whenever I wanted.
I would go to Internet cafés—back then we often called them “Net” shops. Some of the better ones were located in the tourist area and were mainly used by international travelers checking their email.
I spent hours there taking Brainbench exams, studying the questions I did not understand, searching Google for explanations, and then trying again.
Take the test.
Find the weak areas.
Study them.
Try again.
Eventually, I earned two Brainbench Java certifications, including Java programming and Java GUI-related certifications.
Those certificates became surprisingly useful.
When I later applied for technical positions, they helped me get through the first screening stage much more easily. They gave employers something concrete that showed I had technical knowledge beyond my university degree.
So, in a strange way, I owe Brainbench a thank-you.
Brainbench is very different today from what it was during that early Internet era, but it played an important role in the beginning of my professional career.
From Java to Network Security
Later, when I joined New Horizons, I continued taking certification exams.
One of the Brainbench exams I focused on was something like Network Security—I no longer remember the exact title.
This time, things were very different.
Instead of scoring 1.75, I eventually scored above 4.0, earned the Master designation, and, for a period of time, reached the top ranking in Vietnam for that exam.
That experience turned out to be extremely useful when I later prepared for CompTIA Security+.
By then, I already understood how international certification exams worked.
I knew that passing was not only about knowing the subject. You also had to understand how questions were structured, how distractors worked, how to manage your time, and how to remain focused throughout the exam.
Preparing for CompTIA Security+
Then came CompTIA Security+.
At the time, CompTIA was already one of the most recognized names in the IT certification industry. EC-Council was either very new or still relatively unknown compared with today, while CompTIA certifications were highly respected.
And the Security+ exam was expensive.
I remember the exam fee being around $270.
That may not sound extraordinary today, but in Vietnam in the early 2000s, $270 was a very significant amount of money.
There was another problem.
My company was paying for the exam.
If I failed, I would have to reimburse the cost.
That gave me a very strong motivation to pass on the first attempt.
I prepared as seriously as I could.
And yes, to be completely transparent about how certification preparation worked in those days, I also bought TestKing materials while studying. Certification preparation resources and the entire exam-prep ecosystem were quite different back then.
For the final week before the exam, I focused almost entirely on Security+ preparation. I spent that week at OCAP practicing, reviewing questions, checking concepts, and trying to eliminate every weak area I could find.
My goal was simple:
Do everything possible to avoid failing that exam.
Exam Day
Fortunately, all that preparation worked.
I passed.
And not just barely.
I remember my score being extremely close to the maximum possible score of 900—only four points short.
If my memory is correct, that would have been 896.
What surprised me most during the exam was how familiar some of the Security+ questions felt.
Many of the concepts were very similar to the Network Security material I had already encountered through Brainbench.
All those hours sitting in Internet cafés, taking adaptive tests and trying to understand why my answers were wrong, suddenly paid off.
I still remember how happy I was when I passed Security+.
Interestingly, I think I was happier that day than when I later passed certifications that were technically much more advanced—including certifications such as SecurityX many years later.
There is something special about your first major certification.
It changes the way you see yourself.
What Security+ Taught Me
Passing Security+ gave me much more than another line on my résumé.
It gave me confidence.
It showed me that even when something initially looks difficult, expensive, or intimidating, concentrated effort can make an enormous difference.
That lesson has stayed with me throughout my career.
My number-one study strategy has never been particularly complicated:
Identify what matters most right now, and then focus your energy on it.
There are always dozens of things we could be doing.
The difficult part is deciding which one is the most important at this particular moment.
Once you identify it, give it your full attention.
For me, during that week before Security+, the most important thing in the world was passing that exam.
So I focused on it almost completely.
And it worked.
More than twenty years later, after taking many other cybersecurity exams and certifications, I still believe that this ability to focus intensely on the most important objective is one of the most valuable skills anyone can develop.
And that is how my CompTIA Security+ journey began.