Navigating the Cybersecurity Career Path

Foreword: Navigating the Cybersecurity Career Path

“ Well, how did I get here?” David Byrne's plaintive question from the Talking Heads song “Once In a Lifetime” is a constant refrain for most of the cybersecurity professionals I know, and the longer they've been in the industry, the more interesting and varied the answers. The sheer intellectual challenge of trying to protect new technologies from misuse, abuse, and destruction draws people from all walks of life: biology, oceanography, physics, liberal arts, theology, and even Chinese philosophy. The number of “tribes” in cybersecurity is also infinite, from the stereotypical hooded hacker to the medical device researcher, military strategist, and human factors designer. This presents a wealth of possibilities to someone who wants to enter the cybersecurity field but makes it even harder to figure out what path to take.

As a liberal arts dropout with ADHD, I find the dizzying maze of career paths suits me. I combined my on-the-job technical knowledge with my foreign language skills and ended up running regional security for a Swiss bank in Europe, and then I went home to Texas to do it again for the state government (yes, Texan cyber is its own dialect). I spent five years as an industry analyst, talking with hundreds of security vendors, before helping to stand up the Retail and Hospitality Intelligence Sharing and Analysis Center. Today I lead a team of former chief information security officers and apply all that experience ...