Home › Study Guides › Is Security+ Worth It? A Balanced Look
Four cases where it clearly pays off, four where it does not, and the honest version of the return-on-investment argument.
Security+ is worth it if you are breaking into an entry-level security role or targeting a government or defence-adjacent position, and it is worth much less if you already have years of hands-on security experience. Ask around IT forums and you will get two camps back: people who treat it as an almost mandatory rite of passage into cybersecurity, and people who dismiss it as a checkbox credential that does not prove real skill. Both takes are oversimplified. Where you are in your career decides which camp is right for your situation.
There are four cases where it genuinely pays off. The clearest is trying to break into a security-focused role for the first time. Entry-level and junior security postings, meaning security operations centre analyst, security administrator and the junior penetration tester roles that do not yet require years of experience, name Security+ constantly, often as a stated requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Without it your resume may not even clear an automated applicant tracking filter screening for the keyword. The second is targeting government, defence or a defence contractor, where the DoD 8140 approval makes it close to non-negotiable at the baseline level; if that is your target sector the certification is not really optional in practice, whatever your view of its technical rigour, and CompTIA lists its current approval status on its certification page, which is worth checking directly since approved-credential lists do get updated. The third is having IT experience but no formal security credential: if you have been doing security-adjacent work informally, handling access requests, running vulnerability scans or responding to incidents as part of a broader IT role, but hold nothing that documents it, Security+ gives you a portable, recognised way to formalise what you already know and signal it to employers outside your current company. The fourth is wanting a vendor-neutral foundation before specialising, since the certification does not tie itself to a specific vendor's tools and so holds up regardless of which security stack you end up working in, which is useful if you are not yet sure whether you will land in cloud security, network security, governance or somewhere else.
There are four cases where it is a weaker proposition. If you already have several years of hands-on security experience and are past the point where entry-level credentials open doors, it will not move the needle much, because employers hiring for mid-level and senior roles are usually looking at demonstrated experience and more advanced certifications. Getting it at that stage is rarely harmful but rarely the highest-leverage use of your study time. If you are targeting a highly specialised technical track where Security+ is not the recognised standard, such as offensive security and penetration testing, that niche has its own more respected entry credentials, and if you already know exactly which narrow lane you are heading into, going straight there can be more efficient than a general-purpose detour. If you are hoping it substitutes for hands-on experience, it will not: it tests knowledge and, to a limited degree through the performance-based questions, applied scenario reasoning, but it does not simulate the messiness of real production environments, ambiguous incidents or the organisational politics around security decisions. Employers know this, which is why postings for anything beyond entry-level pair a Security+ preference with actual experience requirements. And if you are not sure security is the direction you want at all, the certification carries real prerequisite knowledge and a real time investment, so if you are still weighing security against networking or cloud infrastructure it may be worth some exploratory reading or a shorter introductory course before committing the study hours.
The realistic version of the return-on-investment case is this: Security+ is best understood as a door-opener rather than a career-maker. It gets your resume past keyword filters, satisfies compliance requirements for government-adjacent roles, and gives you a credible baseline to point to in interviews. It does not by itself guarantee a job, a raise or a promotion, since those still depend on the rest of your experience, portfolio and interview performance. People who go in expecting the certification alone to transform their prospects tend to be disappointed; people who treat it as one solid piece of a broader case for themselves tend to find it genuinely useful.
If you are still deciding whether to commit to the full study timeline, you do not need to buy a course or a textbook to get a feel for the material. CoStudy's Security+ decks give you the first ten questions free with no signup, which is enough to see how the terminology and concepts land before you commit real study hours or exam voucher money.
A few questions come up repeatedly. No certification guarantees a job in cybersecurity; this one improves your odds of getting past initial resume screening for entry-level and government-adjacent roles, but hiring decisions still weigh experience, interview performance and overall fit. On whether employers respect it or see it as a checkbox, both perspectives exist in the industry and reality sits between them: it is genuinely valued as a baseline credential, especially for compliance and government-adjacent hiring, while also being common enough that it does not differentiate you the way a harder, more specialised certification would at later career stages. Against a cybersecurity degree it is not really a substitute in either direction, since a degree typically provides broader theoretical grounding and takes years while this is a narrower, faster credential focused on a defined set of practical knowledge, and many people pursue both over time. It remains worth it outside government and defence, where private-sector entry-level and junior security roles still recognise it widely, though not as the functional mandate it is for 8140-covered positions. What to take afterwards depends on your direction, whether that is an analyst track, offensive security, a more advanced generalist path, or a cloud-specific security certification. And on preparation time, most candidates with some IT background land somewhere between five and twelve weeks of consistent study, with someone starting from little IT background planning for the longer end of that range or beyond it.
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