Getting Real Experience

Traditional education or specialized courses are valuable in helping you gain a fundamental understanding of concepts important to being a CSA, but they generally are not enough to fully prepare you for the role. This is because the CSA role is typically seen as a career progression from other roles that help develop the experience necessary to make good decisions as a CSA (it’s often said “bad decisions lead to experience and experience leads to good decisions”). For this reason, it should be fairly rare to find CSA positions open to candidates whose background is limited to time spent in a classroom.

In this chapter, we will examine ways to increase your experience level to help you land your first work assignment as a CSA. The benefits of building out these experiences are as follows:

• Being able to develop practical skills that are not taught in traditional education
• Being able to learn how to apply theoretical knowledge...