BeginnerPentestingCareerFoundations
The Cyber Mentor
5 / 5
Heath Adams's channel — practical pentest tutorials, career advice, and the long-form Practical Ethical Hacking course that launched the TCM Academy and the PNPT certification.
- Creators
- Heath Adams
- Running
- 2018–
- Handle
- @thecybermentor
- Network
- TCM Security
- Status
- Active
- Language
- English
Watch if
People onboarding into pentesting, OSCP candidates wanting an accessible warmup, and anyone considering the PNPT path.
Skip if
Senior offensive practitioners. The channel's center of gravity is foundational and career-shaped; Stephen Sims-class depth lives elsewhere.
Key takeaways
- The free Practical Ethical Hacking series is the cleanest top-of-funnel curriculum in cyber YouTube — most paid courses don't beat it.
- Adams's career-advice videos are unusually specific (interview prompts, salary, freelancing realities) and worth more than the technique videos to early-career viewers.
- TCM Academy / PNPT exists because the channel did; the channel is still the most reliable preview of the program's tone.
Notes
Pair with IppSec for HackTheBox walkthroughs and John Hammond for malware-flavored breadth. The PNPT pathway is a credible OSCP alternative worth considering on its own merits.