Throughout university I was constantly agitating to build and break things, and cybersecurity gave me the most opportunity to do that! Cybersecurity is such a big part of every aspect of technology, and so as I was interested in learning and testing out different technologies and tools, cybersecurity was the constant between all of them.

After university, I joined a graduate program at a Big 4 consulting firm. I worked across a variety of clients on penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and configuration reviews. Over time, my focus shifted to IT risk assessments for organizations trying to implement and upgrade their IT systems.

One of my clients was building a customer-facing application and was going to host it in AWS. I was able to work with them to design and build an AWS environment that would scale out for all of their future projects, and help them understand how to develop their application using some technologies and techniques they had never used before, such as containers and event-driven architectures. It was a super fun technical challenge and we had a great result from the project!

Having a drive to constantly learn new technologies and tools, and constantly wanting to improve your skills, is something that’s very important in a field that changes as fast as this one. I also look for people who have great presentation skills, empathy, and are able to have conversations with both technical team and business leaders equally.

If you get the opportunity to do a project you don’t think you have the skills for, ask yourself if you’re willing to learn. If you only ever do projects you have 100% of the skills and knowledge for already, you’ll be hard-pressed to learn new things.