Taking GPEN After GCIH: My Honest Take

When I signed up for GIAC Penetration Tester (GPEN), I was genuinely excited. GPEN has a strong reputation in the industry, especially for people who want to move into penetration testing. It is structured, hands-on, and grounded in practical tradecraft. For someone entering the offensive side of cybersecurity, it is a solid investment.

But I went into GPEN after already completing GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH), and that context changed the experience significantly.

GPEN is designed to teach the fundamentals of penetration testing. You cover scanning, enumeration, exploitation basics, password attacks, web vulnerabilities, and reporting. It walks you through how an engagement works and how attackers chain weaknesses together. For someone early in their career, especially someone coming from a blue team or general IT background, this is incredibly valuable. It organizes offensive knowledge into a clean framework.

The challenge is that much of that foundation already exists in GCIH.

GCIH focuses on attacker methodology from the defensive side. You learn how attackers scan networks, escalate privileges, pivot, move laterally, and exploit common services. You study tools like Metasploit, understand reverse shells, and dig into web application attacks. The perspective is incident response, but the technical content overlaps heavily with entry to mid-level penetration testing concepts.

When I started GPEN, I quickly realized I was not learning entirely new ground. I was reinforcing concepts I had already studied in GCIH. The terminology was slightly different in places, and GPEN leans more into engagement structure and reporting, but the technical mechanics felt familiar.

That does not make GPEN a bad course. It just changes the cost-benefit equation.

If you are early in your career and you have not taken GCIH or another hands-on offensive course, GPEN is an excellent course. It builds a clear mental model of how attacks unfold. It prepares you for real-world engagements. It gives you credibility when pivoting into penetration testing roles.

If you already hold GCIH and have operational experience, the incremental value shrinks. You may find yourself reviewing scanning techniques you already know, re-learning exploitation patterns you have already practiced, and covering tool usage that feels repetitive.

For professionals in the beginning or middle of their careers, the real question becomes sequencing. If your goal is penetration testing, GPEN makes sense as an early certification. If you have already built a strong offensive foundation through GCIH or practical red team work, you may get more return from something more advanced, such as GIAC Exploit Researcher and Advanced Penetration Tester (GXPN), or from deeper specialization in web, cloud, or Active Directory exploitation.

Certifications are tools. They are not achievements for their own sake. The value comes from what new capability you gain.

GPEN is a great course. I recommend it, especially for those stepping into penetration testing. Just be intentional about when you take it. If you already have GCIH under your belt, understand that you may be paying for reinforcement rather than transformation.

That may still be worth it. Just go in with clear expectations.