Ethan Aldrich

West Career & Technical Academy, Las Vegas: a Graphic Design diploma, which is where the visual side of this map comes from. The technical line starts after it.

CompTIA A+ (220-1201 and 220-1202): hardware, operating systems, endpoint support and troubleshooting. The first rung of the stack that ends at CSIS.

CompTIA Network+: addressing, routing and switching, and network troubleshooting. The formal credential under the SD-WAN, VLAN segmentation and firewall work on the Career line.

CompTIA IT Operations Specialist (CIOS): the stackable credential awarded for holding A+ and Network+ together. Not a separate exam — it certifies the combination.

ITIL v4 Foundations: the service-management vocabulary — incident, problem, change and service request — behind the GLPI ITSM practice run for both companies.

CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701), earned September 2026: threats and attacks, security architecture, operations and incident response, and governance. The formal credential behind the detection stack it interchanges with.

CompTIA CySA+: threat detection, behavioural analytics and incident response — the analyst-side counterpart to the stack already running at P-04. Exam sat September 2026; result pending. Transfers to the Malware Analysis Lab.

CompTIA PenTest+: scoping and planning, reconnaissance, exploitation, and — the part that matters most day to day — writing findings up so someone can act on them. Exam sat September 2026; result pending.

CompTIA Project+ (PK0-005), earned September 2026: project scoping, scheduling, communication and delivery — the discipline behind running a $750K budget and multi-site rollouts.

CompTIA Secure Infrastructure Specialist (CSIS): the stackable credential awarded for holding A+, Network+ and Security+ together. Not a fourth exam — it certifies the combination.

CompTIA Data+ (DA0-002), earned September 2026: data concepts, mining, analysis, visualisation and governance — the formal counterpart to the SQL Server and Power BI reporting that the business actually runs on.

Western Governors University: B.S. Cybersecurity & Information Assurance, approved for graduation and expected December 2026. Competency-based, so each course is a proctored assessment or a defended project rather than seat time.

M.S. Cybersecurity & Information Assurance: planned service beyond the bachelor's, on the same competency-based model. Not yet started — the branch is dashed for a reason.

Assistant Store Manager — the four years before the line turned technical.

Chief Technology Officer: security operations, infrastructure and software for 314 employees across eight locations; 99.993% uptime since 2023 on a $750K annual IT budget.

Chief Technology Officer: IT built from scratch for nine subsidiaries and a team of 52.

Proxmox VE cluster hosting dozens of self-hosted services.

Planned local inference cluster — vLLM + agent orchestration.

Full network + AV integration on Ocean Alexander 32E and Princess Y72.

Detection and monitoring in production across eight sites: Wazuh, Suricata and Zeek feeding Graylog, Elasticsearch and Grafana. Transfer from Security+.

Planned hardened QEMU/KVM detonation lab. Transfer from CySA+.

Planned Stratux ADS-B receiver build for aircraft tracking.

Distributed digital signage — Rust client + Node/TS server, 25+ displays.

Mid-engine K24 swap targeting 200+ HP.

1992 Toyota Corolla Levin SJ — 4A-GE 20V Silvertop, JDM import.

Twin-charged K24 in a 4130 chromoly space frame — early fabrication.