Security Analyst: responsibilities, education, skills and career path

Monitors security tools, investigates events and supports hardening actions.

Entry

Junior

Coding

Low

Key skills

Security monitoringLog analysisNetworkingVulnerability scanning

Common progression

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Career overview

The Security Analyst monitors the security tooling stack, investigates suspicious events and supports hardening and remediation across systems. More hands-on with tooling than the cybersecurity analyst and less specialised than the SOC analyst, the role is a versatile entry point into security that branches into SOC, engineering or network security.

Main responsibilities

Monitor platform health, alerts and dashboards
Analyse security alerts from the SIEM
Analyse application logs to identify root causes
Escalate complex cases to the relevant technical team
Recommend hardening and remediation actions
Document every action in the ticketing tool
Keep technical documentation up to date
Write and maintain knowledge base articles
Lead incident resolution and post-mortem analysis
Run vulnerability scanning and remediation

Technical skills

Security monitoring70%

Log analysis65%

Networking60%

Vulnerability scanning60%

Windows & Linux55%

Incident response basics60%

ITIL processes50%

Scripting basics40%

Technologies

SplunkWazuhNessusQualysEDRWiresharkLinuxWindowsActive DirectoryPythonMITRE ATT&CKServiceNowSuricataMFAVirusTotalGit

Education level

Education requirements vary depending on the company, country and experience. Professional experience, certifications and technical skills can sometimes compensate for formal education.

High School / Bac

Less common

Bac+2 (2-year degree)

Common entry point

Bac+3 (Bachelor)

Common entry point

Bac+5 (Master / Engineering)

Common entry point