Discover the Skills of an Executive Cyber Leader

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe an executive cyber leader career path.
  
• List key skills relevant to the role of an executive cyber leader.
  

An Executive Cyber Leadership Career

Let’s explore whether you’d be a good fit for the role of an executive cyber leader by starting with some questions.

Who are you?

Are you a cyber mover and shaker looking to advance your executive and leadership skills? Are you a business executive, corporate director, senior risk management professional, or business owner involved in making impactful cybersecurity decisions? Are you responsible for developing and implementing cybersecurity policies or participating in cyber leadership in your organization? Then executive cyber leadership might be the career for you.

What do you like to do?

Let’s dive deeper into what you, as an executive cyber leader, spend your time doing. As an executive cyber leader, you’re skilled in enabling business operations while preparing for the prospect of risk. You assess business needs while evaluating emerging technology trends and work to ensure business continuity if an incident occurs. You have a broad view of the organization and apply a focus on threats across a variety of technologies to assess how malicious actors could compromise your organization’s sensitive data. You enjoy working in an environment of constant change and new challenges. 

What type of team do you want to work with?

Executive cyber leadership is usually a supervisory position, and you’re responsible for hiring the right people to support your cyber strategy. You decide whether to use full-time employees or managed service providers to carry out cybersecurity tasks. You build non-siloed horizontal teams to implement adequate controls and manage risk to help create subject matter experts across the business. You work collaboratively, which builds trust and cooperation throughout your organization.

What is the career trajectory for this role? 

To become a cybersecurity executive, you should have a broad range of experience and knowledge across multiple disciplines of cybersecurity, and strong people leadership skills. It’s important to balance your understanding of key principles and best practices of your domain with your understanding of how to manage and motivate others. The best cybersecurity leaders have diverse backgrounds and can come from deep information technology (IT) training or from the risk departments of banks and other regulated industries.

As an executive cyber leader, you should understand business at a deep level. The industry needs people who can communicate with other senior leaders using business risk language instead of talking about network logs and threat patterns. The central purpose of business  risk language is to assist management with evaluating the completeness of its efforts to identify events and scenarios that merit consideration in a risk assessment.

The words you use matter. When risk managers fail to establish a common vocabulary or create a shared understanding of risk throughout the enterprise, they undermine the impact and value of a robust governance, risk management, and compliance framework. Business risk usually occurs in one of four ways: strategic risk, compliance risk, operational risk, and reputational risk. Effective cybersecurity leaders can explain what the risks are to the business and how security incidents will impact sales, profits, future growth, and the company's reputation.

You should also have the ability to influence and motivate those around you in order to cultivate strategic partnerships with stakeholders. To build these skills, you may be a team lead, manager, or a director of an information security program before becoming an executive cyber leader. These roles may present an opportunity to transition from managing technical processes and systems to developing and harmonizing strategies that build an information security organization.

Why should you consider this career?

As an executive cyber leader, you’ll be part of an exciting, challenging field. Cybersecurity as an overall industry has a very promising career outlook. It has low unemployment and many countries, industries, and organizations are in need of this expertise. You can earn high pay, and you’ll be able to choose an industry that interests you, from government to nonprofit to private sector. Another advantage of this career is that you can use your entire skill set. You can differentiate yourself by drawing on your skill set from prior jobs, such as IT, administration, or even accounting, while also building new cybersecurity skills.

Executive Cyber Leader Skills

After hearing more about this career, are you getting excited about leading organizations to a more secure cyber future? Let’s turn our focus to the education and skills that are valuable in this profession.

Education

A bachelor’s degree in business, public administration, applied science, computer science, applied software, or an IT-related field is valuable in this career path.

Experience

Typically, employers look for candidates with a minimum of  4 to 7 years of experience in a significant security role such as operational management experience, though on average it’s more likely to find job postings that require 7 to 10 years of experience. Employers also look for experience in risk management, directing security programs, and technical and business skills.  

Certifications

Pursuing a certification is a great idea for this field. Certifications that address information system management, security leadership, strategic planning, and more allow you to skill up and get your foot in the door. Here are some common certifications for executive cyber leaders. 

Knowledge

Working as an executive cyber leader involves several skill sets. An understanding of common information security management frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) or the International Organization for Standards and International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC 27001) is encouraged.

Individuals in this role should also have exposure to enterprise systems, cloud solutions, and other security technologies, and keep abreast of cutting-edge technologies and best practices. It’s also a wise idea to be aware of defense in depth strategies covering operational management and data privacy. 

Additionally, you should have experience in creating policies that reflect system security objectives, identifying threats, supporting infrastructure, and managing organizations. 

Business Skills

A huge part of success as an executive cyber leader involves communication and stakeholder management. The ability to manage risk and compliance, think critically, and listen effectively are also paramount. You should also be approachable and have strong interpersonal skills. Part of your role as a cyber leader is to mentor more junior professionals and help them grow. Having these skills allows you to do that.

Sum It Up

In this module, you’ve been introduced to the goals of executive cyber leadership. You’ve learned more about the importance of executive cyber leadership in helping your organization face the persistent and sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten you and your customers’ security and privacy. You’ve also discovered the duties, skills, and qualifications of an executive cyber leader.

In the next module, Responsibilities of an Executive Cyber Leader, you learn how to develop cybersecurity policies and plans, prioritize cybersecurity resources, integrate cybersecurity with strategy and operations, and support cybersecurity operations. Interested in learning more about cybersecurity roles and hearing from security professionals? Check out the Cybersecurity Career Path on Trailhead.

Resources

• External Site: National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies (NICCS): Executive Cyber Leadership
• External Site: World Economic Forum (WEF): 10 reasons why today’s cyber leaders are tomorrow’s world leaders