David Gee says early-career cybersecurity professionals focus on technical skills like Java or prompt engineering, but advancement depends on experience and behaviors. His advice: identify the job two levels above yours, then volunteer for stretch assignments that expose you to those responsibilities now.
and all of us focus on skills and knowledge when we're young in our career, want to be really good at, you know, Java programming or large language model prompt engineering, et cetera, and then have knowledge about large language models. But then we actually understand that actually, as you get more advanced in your career, what matters more is actually the other side, the E and the B, which is experience and behaviors. And so what we talk about is how do you try to design your own career and saying, I'm thinking 2 jobs ahead. So if I'm talking to you, Katie, I'm saying 2 jobs ahead of where you are now, what is that person above me, he or she, doing in terms of experience and behaviors that I'm not doing? And try to map that out. So in some cases, you might say, okay, that person's the CIO and that person's doing a, you know, global IT strategy, right? How can I volunteer to do a stretch assignment? How can I volunteer to be involved in that? Maybe I can't do it by myself, but I can get involved in that by volunteering, by telling them I'm interested in learning about strategy and helping the process.
