What I Wish I’d Known Before My First SOC Role
Starting a first SOC role is exciting. It can also feel like being dropped into the deep end with a headset on and five tabs open before you have even logged in properly.
If you have been learning through courses, labs, or self study, you will have a head start. But a live SOC environment has its own reality. It is noisy. It is messy. And a lot of the work is judgement, and careful analysis.
This blog is for anyone about to start in a SOC, or anyone in their first few months and quietly wondering if they are doing it right.
The biggest surprise: SOC work is not dramatic most of the time
Most people imagine SOC work as constant incident response. In practice, much of your day is:
Reviewing alerts that lack context
Working out what is normal in your environment
Investigating activity that turns out to be harmless
Documenting what you found so someone else can pick it up
That might sound underwhelming, but it is where good analysts are made. You build pattern recognition and judgement through repetition.
1. Alerts arrive without context
In labs, an alert often comes with a clear storyline. In real life, an alert is just a signal.
It might be:
A genuine threat
A misconfiguration
A normal behaviour that looks odd
A noisy detection that needs tuning
Early on, it helps to slow yourself down and start with a simple question:
What would I need to know for this alert to make sense?
That usually leads you to checking:
The asset and its role
The user and whether their activity is expected
Whether the alert has happened before
What else is happening around the same time
2. Investigations are rarely clean
You will often have partial data. Logs do not line up. Tooling behaves differently depending on the system. Someone changed something and nobody told the SOC.
That can feel frustrating, especially if you expect every case to end with a clear answer.
A lot of investigations differently, and not all of them close, some will give you enough concern to escalate and others pass to an analyst with a good hand-over towards the end of your shift.
That is normal. SOC work is often about reducing uncertainty, not eliminating it completely.
3. Escalation is a judgement call, not a tick box
New analysts often think escalation decisions are based purely on severity. In practice, the decision is usually shaped by:
How credible the activity looks
The likely impact if you are wrong
How confident you are in the data
The cost of disrupting systems versus monitoring longer
If you are unsure, the best habit you can build is explaining your thinking, not guessing.
A useful phrase is:
Here is what I know, here is what I do not know yet, and here is what I think we should do next.
That makes it easier for a senior analyst to support you quickly.
4. Closure is a skill, not a shortcut
Closing an alert can feel uncomfortable at first. It can look like you are giving up.
Good closure is the opposite. It means you have:
Worked out why the alert fired
Confirmed the most likely explanation
Checked for anything that changes the risk
Written enough context for future reference
The point is not to close quickly. The point is to close well.
5. The mental load is real
SOC work involves constant context switching. You might be deep into one case, then a higher priority alert lands. You might be asked a question on another investigation while you are still trying to document your own.
This is why the most underrated skills in a SOC are note taking and handover quality.
Two simple habits make a big difference:
Write notes as you go, not at the end
Capture your assumptions and open questions, not just the outcome
It saves time, reduces stress, and helps the whole team work more smoothly.
What good looks like in your first 90 days
You do not need to be the fastest person in the room. You do not need to know every tool. You do not need to have perfect instincts yet.
You will build trust by doing the basics well:
Being curious about root causes, not just outcomes
Asking questions early rather than struggling quietly
Using playbooks properly, but thinking beyond them when needed
Documenting clearly so others can follow your work
Learning from reviews and repeating patterns
Confidence comes from exposure and repetition, not from pretending you already know.
A quick reminder: you are not behind
Almost everyone in their first SOC role feels the same mix of excitement and self doubt.
You are not expected to get everything right. You are expected to stay engaged, be honest about what you do not know yet, and keep learning through the work.
Want a practical reference you can come back to?
If you want a clearer picture of how SOC work actually flows, how decisions get made under uncertainty, and how careers develop over time, download our Cybersecurity Career Playbook. It is designed to be a reference you can dip into whenever your role or priorities shift.
