What will your future bring?
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future. It’s an inevitable part of getting older, being responsible for children, and having more time behind you than in front of you. It’s also brought on by having a role involving projects that take six months plus to bring to fruition, and need to be coordinated with other departments 15-18 months in the future. Lastly, living in the eternal now of a pandemic, where it feels like everything stays the same and we have no control, you have to look beyond today and beyond the timeless present to something that reminds us of a time without a major virus. At least I do, even if you don’t feel the same way.
What’s that got to do with security, you may ask. Truthfully, it’s not related to security more than any other career. But, at least early in our careers, security professionals deal with tickets and incidents that revolve around ‘now’, rather than some distance in the future. I started my career as a Help Desk technician more than two decades ago, and most days I was struggling to get through a queue of problems with printers, desktops, and servers. It was even worse when I managed an Intrusion Detection System and I’d have a few minutes at a time to review, categorize, and respond to the alerts streaming across my screen.
We have also chosen a career known for its high turnover rate. Until my current role, I’d never stayed at an organization for more than three years, and many of them for 18 months or less. I suspect my experiences aren’t uncommon, and that many people still shift jobs frequently, looking for a new challenge, better pay, or a promotion they couldn’t get if they stayed where they were. It’s very hard to plan for the future when the horizon you see is so close most people are just getting settled in when they’re looking for a new job.
We joke about it when we have our HR mandated yearly reviews and our manager asks where we’d like to be in five years. It’s hard to think that far ahead, especially when we are in the habit of changing roles every year and a half. I jokingly said, “Employed.” once. My manager asked, “Here?”, and I had to stop in my tracks to give that serious thought. I did not stay at that company for five years, but I have been at Akamai for nine years as of mid-September.
Leaving an organization for an opportunity to grow, better pay, or even just to escape boredom isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be short sighted. When was the last time you sat down and thought about where you want to be in five years? Even if the answer is ‘not here’ or ’employed’, what are you doing now that leads you in that direction? Floating through an eternal now is relatively easy, and for many avoids the stress of not being where you really want to be, but it also doesn’t lead to the destination we desire, unless you’re really, really, and I mean REALLY lucky.
There’s a lot of sayings that amount to stating the real skill you need to develop for life is learning how to recognize luck when it comes along and setting yourself up to take advantage of it. What have you done lately to set yourself up for that offramp that leads to the success you want to achieve? Would you recognize it when you saw it? That’s a part of what thinking about the future enables you to do.
I won’t pretend I have a real answer to thinking about the future. Even though I work in a security team and have a lot of experience in the field, I have the seemingly non-security title of ‘Editorial Director’ where I work. Despite what I wrote earlier, this was never my goal. But it was something writing, blogging, podcasting, and a host of other side efforts prepared me for. When a little dirt road led off from the career path I thought I wanted, I followed it out of curiosity, in part because all the skills I’d collected seemed to work so well with this opportunity. I get to lead a team that turns security research into something we share with the world in our publications, which turned out to be the real goal I’d never quite identified to myself before it appeared.
There’s nothing that says a plan will come to fruition. But failure to plan, failure to look ahead, almost guarantees that you’ll miss that dirt road that leads to the career you really want. As with my path, it’s not necessarily about learning how to use a new technology or expanding on your existing skill set. The right thing to do might be getting a degree or learning a skill you never thought you’d apply to security.
One final point: Whatever career path you think you might want to follow, learn to write! Very few skills will serve you better and set you apart from your peers more than learning to write well. Learn both to be brief but succinct, and to expound upon an idea at length. Being able to recognize which of those two is appropriate at any given juncture is a skill too few have. There are few skills you can plan to develop that will be more beneficial to every career choice than learning to express yourself coherently and explain why your ideas are important.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Writing and Ramblings authored by [email protected] (Martin McKeay). Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MartinMckeaysNetworkSecurityBlog/~3/u5itwDXw7Zg/
