This week I moved from Wrexham to Wallasey, on the Wirral, directly across the Mersey from Liverpool. It's not a technical post, but it is a real update. My location sits on this site and on my CV, and a silent edit to a field felt like the wrong way to handle it.

Why leave Wrexham

Wrexham is where I did my MSc in Cybersecurity, finished this year with a Distinction and an 88% dissertation mark. It was the right place for that: a good university, a manageable cost of living, and enough quiet to write 15,000 words of testbed methodology without much else competing for attention.

But I was only ever in Wrexham for the course. When my tenancy came up for renewal at the same time the degree finished, signing on for another year would have been a default, not a decision. The real question was where I could reach the most security employers, and the answer wasn't Wrexham.

Why Wallasey

Wallasey sits at the northern tip of the Wirral peninsula, on the opposite bank of the Mersey to Liverpool. Merseyrail runs under the river, so Liverpool city centre is around twenty minutes away by train, or a ferry ride if I'm not in a hurry. Liverpool has a genuine cluster of financial services, logistics, and managed service and security providers, and being able to get to an interview or an office there without a multi-hour round trip matters more than it sounds.

It also widens the commutable range without tying me to one city. Chester is around forty minutes by car, Manchester is about an hour, and the wider North West opens up in a way it didn't from Wrexham, which was well placed for North Wales but a longer haul in most other directions.

What actually changes

For the job search, the honest answer is: less than you'd think, and more than nothing.

Less, because I'm still open to remote and hybrid roles, and nothing about that has shifted. My firewall work at Casper Technologies was on site and across client premises, so I'm comfortable in an office and in front of a customer's rack, but most network security roles today offer at least a hybrid pattern and I'm equally happy with that. The move isn't a signal that I want to be in an office five days a week, and it isn't a signal that I don't.

More, because it removes a filter that recruiters and hiring managers apply without necessarily saying so: distance from the office. A posting that says "hybrid, one or two days a week in Liverpool" was a hard sell from Wrexham. From Wallasey it's a straightforward yes. That alone reopens a set of roles I'd previously have had to pass on or talk my way around.

For anyone reading this from the hiring side, the practical version is:

What stays the same

The work I'm looking for hasn't moved. I'm still after a network security, SOC, or detection engineering role where security is the job itself rather than an add-on, and I'm still writing up the WAF research and Sentinel detection work on this blog in the meantime. The MSc, the dissertation, the Sentinel lab: none of that changes because my postcode did.

So this is a small, practical adjustment rather than a turning point. Closer to a bigger job market, still flexible on remote and hybrid, still chasing the same work. The technical write-ups will keep coming as usual. If you're hiring for network or detection engineering roles in or around Merseyside, or remotely, the contact form is the quickest way to reach me.