#93 - How to Become a Cyber Security Expert

How do you become a Cyber Security Expert?

Hello and welcome to another episode of CISO Tradecraft, the podcast that provides you with the information, knowledge, and wisdom to be a more effective cybersecurity leader.  My name is G. Mark Hardy, and today we're going to talk about how to provide advice and mentoring to help people understand how to become a cybersecurity expert.  As always, please follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to our podcasts.

As a security leader, part of your role is to develop your people.  That may not be written anywhere in your job description and will probably never be on a formal interview or evaluation, but after years of being entrusted with leadership positions, I have learned what differentiates true leaders from those who just accomplish a great deal is the making of the effort to develop your people.

Now, you may have heard the phrase, "take care of your people," but I'll take issue with that.  I take care of my dog.  I take care of a family member who is sick, injured, or incapacitated.  Why?  Because they are not capable of performing all of life's requirements on their own.  For the most part, your people can do this.  If you are constantly doing things for people who could have otherwise done it themselves, you run the risk of creating learned helplessness syndrome.  People, and even animals, can become conditioned to not do what they otherwise could do out of a belief that someone else will do it for them.  I am NOT going to get political here, so don't worry about that.  Rather, I want to point out that effective leaders develop their people so that they may become independent actors and eventually become effective leaders themselves.  In my opinion, you should measure your success by the promotion rate of the people entrusted to you, not by your own personal career advancement or financial success.

That brings me to the subject of today's podcast -- how do you counsel and mentor others on how to become a cyber security expert?  If you are listening to this podcast, there's a very good chance that you already are an expert in our field, but if not, keep listening and imagine that you are mentoring yourself, because these lessons can apply to you without having seek out a mentor.  Some people figure it out, and when asked their secret, they're like Bill Murray in the movie Stripes, "We trained ourselves, sir!"  But most of the time, career mastery involves learning from a number of others.

Today on CISO Tradecraft we are going to analyze the question, " How do you become a Cyber Security Expert?"  I'm going to address this topic as if I were addressing someone in search of an answer.  Don't tune out early because you feel you've already accomplished this.  Keep listening so you can get a sense of what more you could be doing for your direct reports and any proteges you may have.

Let’s start at the beginning.  Imagine being a high school kid with absolutely zero work experience (other than maybe a paper route -- do kids still do that?)  You see someone that tells you they have a cool job where they get paid to ethically hack into computers.  Later on, you meet a second person that says they make really good money stopping bad actors from breaking into banks.  Somehow these ideas stick into your brain, and you start to say to yourself, you know both of those jobs sound pretty cool.  You begin to see yourself having a career in Cyber Security.  You definitely prefer it to jobs that require a lot of manual labor and start at a low pay.  So, you start thinking, "how I can gain the skills necessary to land a dream job in cyber security that also pays well?"

At CISO Tradecraft we believe that there are really four building blocks that create subject matter experts in most jobs.  The four building blocks are: