How InfoSec Institute Alum Rexson Serrao Earned the World’s Highest CGEIT Score

InfoSec Institute alum Rexson Serrao is Senior Director of IT, PMO and Planning at the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB) in San Francisco. After enrolling in InfoSec Institute’s Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT) Boot Camp and sitting his exam, Rex recieved global recognition from ISACA for earning the world’s highest CGEIT exam score.

Rex is no stranger to certification prep. In addition to passing his CGEIT exam, Rex holds seven other certifications: PMP, CSM, CSPO, ITIL, COBIT, Microsoft Certified Excel Analyst and Microsoft Professional for Data Science.

We sat down with Rex to chat about his certification experience and the strategies he used to take home the world’s highest CGEIT score in 2017.

Why Did You Decide to Earn Your CGEIT Certification?

Rex: Security and IT certifications help me speak with a voice of authority. I’ve earned seven certifications and received them in order of how I wanted my career to progress.

For example, I earned my ITIL certification because I wanted to take on application support, and later earned my COBIT to assist with IT governance. Having practical experience is important, but being able to ground my experience in best-practice frameworks where possible has really helped me professionally. COBIT and the CGEIT in particular tie IT and security investments to ROI, business value and IT business alignment. Sharing this perspective with my leadership team and knowing the best words to use really helped capture my executive team’s attention.  

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I pursued the CGEIT as my firm started to explore risk management. At the same time, there was also a push to do better benefits realization. I saw the CGEIT certification as the next level up from my COBIT foundation certification. It was a natural extension of COBIT’s fifth principal, Separating Governance from Management. This (Read more...)