How to become a cyber expert

This is a brief guide on how to become a cyber expert in non-English speaking countries.

If you want to become one in an English speaking country, the bar is pretty high, and competition from established experts is serious. Your best chance in one of these countries is to work for the government, with two major careers paths: either join an outfit that hires so many computer folks that chaos reigns supreme, or - recommended - go into an agency that has no track record of anything "cyber" and talk yourself up the ladder.

Either works, as you may have heard: a cyber expert of the US Interior Department worked in the field for five years with only a fake degree.

In the rest of the world, you can try these steps if you have no specialized training and experience:

Call yourself a cyber expert
It is not a regulated job title, and you need to take ownership of it. As in any other job, you'll be too old to enjoy the title if you wait for other people to start using it in reference to you.

Get a Twitter and Facebook account and start experting
Start you with re-tweets or simple statements of facts. You'll soon learn who can be made fun of and who needs to be respected. In order for you to be taken seriously, use your real name, or a close approximation.
If you go with a pseudonym, you may eventually find recognition, but you have to be very good - and few people achieve this. 

Stay away from coding
If you write software for a living, you will make mistakes, and you may have to spend lots of time to live down past software bugs if you worked on highly visible, critical projects. Instead, use existing tools and write about those.

Brush up on jargon 
Binge watch the US comedy series Silicon Valley to get a usable amount of jargon and an overview of the mores of the Valley of the Silicon Kings.
Your cyber job will involve both praising of and bitching about Silicon Valley. And since you can not work there or don't have the time to, the TV series will  give you all that you need.

Select a hand to feed you
Since you are learning, the title of the paragraph is a reference to the tag line of British IT site The Register. Twice daily visits to The Register, or El Reg as you should call it, are mandatory for your cyber career.
Selecting a hand to feed you is easy if you are willing to work with "structures of authority" and love a steady, good paycheck, then law enforcement or the military are where you should go.
Outside of government and big industry, life as a cyber expert is hard, and you may well live on the poverty line after deduction of hardware and software.

It takes a thief to catch a thief
Computing is one of the few areas in modern society where this idiom is still valid. It no longer is valid in its original field, mind you. But in IT, you can still morph from bad guy (black hat) to good guy (white hat) and be able to feed a family and raise kids. So, a benevolent background as a minor hacker willing and able to jettison your belief system at the drop of a hat (the black one) will ensure a decent life.

Adventures for sysadmins
I know, there are some sysadmins out there who believe they should get a crack at the glamorous life of the cyber expert. I understand this dream of people who live under artificial light, breathe artificial air, and see the packets of life fly by - indicated only by flickering LEDs. Sure, you can try.
First, ditch the sysadmin - call yourself Internet Engineer with cyber expertise, or go straight to cyber expert. Nobody in the world really respects people who know which way a byte points (big or little endian), but they do love to hear you say demilitarized zone.
Just don't quit your day job.

Get a degree in your native language
First off, "cyber" is talking and writing with as much complexity as you can contrive. Engineers may come to hate abstraction layers, but the new you, the cyber expert, will love them. Only you will be able to lay out an advanced insider threat strategy that will include "stimuli" to be "injected" into the work environment and keep a straight face presenting it to the guys who decide on the budget.
The blogster would call your fine strategy a "gussied up sting operation" or "automated stings" and fail to get a measly dollar for it, whereas you will walk away rich.

Learn English
Okay, that's a pet peeve, possibly not even a good one given my own limitations. But folks, I simply cannot stand it any more when someone writes "principle engineer" or "principle developer". My principal would say this goes against his principles.

Work for a huge, unwieldy or boring organization
Recently, the example of a UN CyberSecurity expert made the rounds because the gentleman sent out a few disastrously incorrect tweets about the anonymization tool TOR. Everybody made fun of him, but we at the K-Landnews believe he independently discovered some of the steps laid out above.
Alternatively, work for a boring institution like the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Until the recent great data breach, almost nobody outside of the federal government had ever heard of OPM. So, find a place where they are still discussing whether the spelling CyberSecurity or cyber security is the right one.

[Update 10/1] Added Work for a huge, unwieldy or boring organization