Security+ is live on Revy's Tech Journey

Why Security+ matters right now

Security+ is the cert employers list when they post a junior security analyst, SOC analyst, or security engineer role and do not want to filter out career-changers. It is vendor-neutral, it covers the breadth of the field, and it is the cert the federal government and its contractors point to most often.

On the demand side: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects information security analyst roles to grow 33 percent from 2023 to 2033, more than ten times the average across all occupations. Holders of Security+ earn in the 85,000 to 110,000 dollar range depending on region and prior experience, with SOC analyst and security engineer roles trending higher.

On the gatekeeping side: the Department of Defense replaced its old 8570 workforce directive with DoD 8140 in 2023. Anyone working on a DoD network in an IAT Level II or III role is required to hold an approved cert, and Security+ is one of the most common ways to satisfy that requirement. If you want a clearance-adjacent job at a contractor near a base, the recruiter is going to ask for this cert before they ask for anything else.

Put the two together and Security+ is one of the highest-leverage 350-dollar exams a career-changer can sit. It opens doors that A+ alone does not.

What is live in RTJ Security+ today

Every surface we ship for A+ and Net+ is live for Security+ on day one. Nothing is locked behind a "coming soon" placeholder. The breakdown:

• 28 lessons across the five SY0-701 domains. General Security Concepts, Threats and Vulnerabilities, Security Architecture, Security Operations, and Security Program Management and Oversight. Each lesson maps to one or more specific objectives in the CompTIA blueprint.
• 500 Q-bank questions with explanations grounded in NIST, MITRE ATT&CK, CIS, and OWASP source material. Every item cites its objective ID. No vague distractors, no leftover Sec+ V14 wording.
• 1,141 Adventure scenes across the same 28 lessons. SOC-flavored helpdesk-to-incident-response scenarios with branching choices, NIST and MITRE citations on every decision, and the same five archetype taxonomy as A+ and Net+. The section below walks through what the Security+ campaign actually puts you inside.
• 18 SOC simulator tickets in the dedicated Sim mode. Triage real-feeling alerts, decide what to escalate, and live with the consequences when you guess.
• 25 performance-based questions covering the interaction formats CompTIA actually uses on the real exam. Hotspot, drag-target, ordered-list, validated-input, and log-picker.
• 800 flashcards for spaced repetition on the high-volume vocabulary the exam loves to test. CIA triad, frameworks, attack types, indicators of compromise.

Pricing is the same as the rest of the platform. Free tier gets you a meaningful taste of every surface. Pro unlocks unlimited attempts, the full Q-bank, the full Adventure Mode, and the full Sim queue across all three cert tracks.

The trinity: A+ then Net+ then Security+

We deliberately built A+, Network+, and Security+ in that order. They are the three certs CompTIA itself stacks into its core technician path, and they are the three certs employers most often list together when they want a candidate with broad foundations rather than narrow specialty.

A+ teaches you the physical world. Laptops, printers, mobile devices, operating systems, troubleshooting methodology. It is the cert that tells an employer you can sit at a service desk and not panic when the user hands you a broken machine.

Net+ teaches you what connects those machines. Ethernet, IP, routing, switching, DNS, firewalls at the packet level. It is the cert that tells an employer you can read a network diagram, troubleshoot a connectivity problem above Layer 1, and understand what a router actually does.

Security+ teaches you who is attacking that network and how. It assumes you already know the building (A+) and the plumbing (Net+). When the lesson talks about a VLAN hopping attack, the platform assumes you know what a VLAN is. When it talks about a misconfigured DNS resolver enabling cache poisoning, it assumes you know what DNS does in the first place. Security+ is the cap on the technical-foundation stack. After it, the next moves are specialty: cloud, pentest, GRC, or vendor-specific paths.

You can absolutely take Security+ first. People do it. But the people who learn the field deeply and stay employable across role changes tend to walk the stack in order.

Try Security+ free before you commit

The first Practice Exam attempt on every track is free. One attempt, no credit card, no pop-up after the score. For Security+ that is 3 performance-based questions plus 20 multiple-choice items, 30 minutes on the clock, full timing pressure, and a complete Readiness Score at the end.

The readiness card breaks the score down by domain. Where you are strong, where you are weak, and which specific objectives the missed items mapped to. If you decide the platform is not for you, you walk away with a real signal about where you stand. If you decide it is, you already know which lessons to start with.

That is the deal across the board. We do not believe in selling you a tier before you have felt the product work for you.

What Security+ Adventure Mode actually puts you inside

Adventure Mode is the surface that gets the most "I did not know studying could feel like this" feedback on A+ and Net+. For Security+ the framing shifts from the helpdesk to the SOC, and the scenarios get sharper. A few of the situations you will sit inside today:

• A junior SOC analyst sees a Splunk alert at 2 in the morning. Authentication-failure spike from a country the company does not operate in. Decide whether to escalate, block the source, or wait for context. The choice changes the next scene.
• A junior tech finds an unlabeled USB drive in the lobby. Plug it into an air-gapped analysis box? Hand it to security? Leave it where it was? The scene assumes you have read the AUP and rewards reading the policy first.
• A phishing email reaches the CFO's inbox claiming to be from the CEO and asking for a same-day wire transfer. Walk through the indicators, decide which control should have caught it, and write the after-action note.
• A vendor pushes a software update that turns out to ship with a backdoor. Supply-chain attack live in your environment. Decide how to scope the blast radius and what to do first while the incident is still hot.

Every scenario uses the same archetype taxonomy we lock for the whole platform. The hand-waver who underreports symptoms. The self-diagnoser who tells you the fix before you ask. The prepared user who hands you logs. The deadline-panic user who needs it fixed five minutes ago. The reluctant user who does not want to be on the phone. Reading the person on the other end of the ticket is part of the skill, and the Adventure scenes make you practice it.

Where to go from here

If you already have an RTJ account, the Security+ track is sitting in your dashboard right now. Open it, hit the Practice Exam, see your starting readiness. The whole loop takes 35 minutes.

If you do not have an account yet, sign up on the free tier and run the same loop. No card required. The Security+ track page walks through the full objective map if you want to see the syllabus before you start.

If you are mapping a longer path, the A+ track and Net+ track pages cover the rest of the trinity in the same depth.

Questions about your specific path? Email the team. We reply personally, usually within a day.

About the authors

Nick Miller

Founder and Lead Author

IT Service Center Manager and former CTE / IT teacher. Owner of Revtek IT Solutions in Chicago's south suburbs. Writes everything that ships under his name and reviews every line of Revy-assisted drafting before publish.

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Revy

Study buddy · AI co-author

Revy helps draft and structure these posts. Every piece is reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by Nick before publish. We disclose this here because it is the right thing to do. See the AI Policy for the full stance.