As you start or continue your journey in Information Security (Info Sec), I’ve always recommend scanning an environment to actually learn what systems are present and relevant vulnerabilities. When talking to interested minds, I suggest hands-on experience with tools to gain the insight. There are various open source tools and demo commercial products that can be used to test. One product that I recommend is Nessus Essentials. It will allow you to download and install the software to do a vulnerability assessment of your own network. *Do not use this software outside of a network that you aren’t responsible for or own.*

Learning the tool, processes, and results will definitely help you land a job sooner as you will be able to speak to similar scenarios in your own lab network vs the corporate networks.

OpenVas and Kali Linux are other vulnerability tools that can be used to learn vulnerability scanning.