The Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate
- a 168-hour survey, not a skill-builder

The Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate is not job-qualifying and does not provide you with immediately marketable skills. 
It is, however, a useful orientation tool for people entering cybersecurity cold, particularly those trying to decide whether deeper investment (time, money, or both) is warranted.

After over twenty years in the National Security and Federal Law Enforcement business, I recently made the decision to pivot to cybersecurity, not only as an adventure in up-skilling 
for my current job, but also as a foray into a possible post-retirement income generator. The first challenge: deciding what to take as a first step in a world drowning in 
certifications and free advice. One of the compTIA certs? Which one? SANS? Quite a monetary commitment at such an early stage. CISSP? Am I prepared for that? Outside of poking around 
on a Linux box looking (confusedly) at Wireshark and spending a bit of time on the Mac's Terminal trying to make out why they replaced Bash with Z-Shell, I didn't have much experience 
to tap into to answer that question. I needed at least a rough idea of what lay ahead of me before committing serious money or time - enter the Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate.

This certificate is effectively a sampler platter of cybersecurity topics: tiny portions of several profound topics ranging from strategy to methodology to tools to coding languages. 
As you progress through the program, you will be exposed to cybersecurity strategy such as the "CIA" triad of maintaining the Confidentiality, Integrity, and the Availability of data; 
as well as the common Cybersecurity Framework ("CSF") approach to guide you through managing risk via the five core functions entitled Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. 
You'll understand that these are better thought of as a wheel, not a sequential list, and that they help conceptualize the various steps you'll need to take to ensure the "CIA" of your 
protected data.

You'll be introduced to "SIEM" (Security Information and Event Management) and Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) tools like Splunk and Suricata (get used to deliberately 
obscure names...this industry is rife with them) that collect and sort important (and nearly endless) network and OS log data so a mere mortal can make sense of what threats you need 
to concern yourself with -- more on that later.

You'll be whisked through concepts like network architecture (hubs, switches, routers, clients, servers) and two models (called "TCP/IP" and "OSI") to help understand the ways the 
different components work, or do not work, directly with each other. This section is both critical in understanding threat vectors (evidently more commonly known in the industry as your 
"attack surface") and woefully under-instructedâ-- whether due to complexity or time constraints, you'll barely remember it by the end.

You'll get the stingiest sample of the Linux operating system (far and away the de-facto standard for this work) and SQL queries to get a feel for how databases might be queried for 
information relevant to security. In what I found to be one of the more enlightening topics, you'll also be introduced, in a very basic way, to how SQL can be exploited by hackers 
for nefarious purposes.

Next, the program will introduce you to Google's view on how to classify "assets" (what you're protecting) and conduct vulnerability assessments. In the same section, you'll get a taste 
of authentication and cryptography (how to protect information to maintain the "C" and the "I" of the "CIA" triad).

In what is perhaps the most exhaustive part of the certification, you'll receive a double portion of instruction in the Python coding language (presumably the portion they withheld from 
you on Linux). This is the one area of the cert where I would argue you might leave with the beginnings of an actual skill as opposed to simply a sneak peek. It's clear Google is looking 
for Python coders. I felt this was the most complete and most practically presented section.

Finally, you'll stumble through what felt like a last-minute add-on that incorporates AI into your cybersecurity studies via Google tools (naturally) NotebookLM and Gemini. 
These left more questions for me than answers given how shallow the exercises were for this section. That said, I can envision that the pace of improvement of LLMs is far more than whatever 
the support staff for the cert can keep up with, so, bottom line: AI will do that for you, too.

The cert is assessed to take approximately 168 hours -- six months at seven hours per week. In all likelihood, if you're diligent you'll get it done in less time, possibly much less time. 
The tests, of which there are multiple in each section, range from almost embarrassingly easy (as in, you can logically or practically eliminate all but one answer whether or not you know 
the material) to the occasional "Hmm, I don't remember this...I'd better go back and re-look at that lesson." Critically, the various modules do not build on each-other, so once you finish 
one you may very well forget much of what you learned by the end of the subsequent one.

So - what is the bottom line? Will you walk away from the Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate with marketable skills you can put to use right away? No. Not even close. 
But that's not to say that the cert is not worth it. If you are coming to this discipline from outside the industry, cold, it will provide you with an introduction and some new vocabulary 
on what you will be defending, what tools - or at least types of tools - you might use to defend it, what process you could follow to do it, and how (via coding, for example) you might do so. 
What you will need to do next is consolidate this knowledge via real-world scenarios *and* additional structured study.