The Journey So Far: Learning Curves and Familiarities

A belated Happy New Year to you all and welcome to my 2nd blog and 1st of 2021!

This blog would have come sooner if it were not for a packed November to January school holidays in which I undertook a number of virtual internships, gained some certifications in Splunk, currently working towards my CompTIA Security+ and Fortinet NSE4 and undertook some work experience as a student IT Help Desk support assistant at Tafe SA. It was a rewarding experience and glad I took the initiative. Nothing like a bit of resume building.

As you all know, in my past life I was a junior town planner wanting a fresh start as a result of a certain pandemic early last year. I must say it has not been the chalk and cheese experience I thought it was going to be. On the contrary, the move from town planning to cyber security for me was an easy transition to make. Of course there was the learning curve of learning and using programs, scripting languages, firewalls, threat analysis, detection and response. But I was surprised by the number of transferable skills between the two very different professions, three of the biggest ones I have explained below:

1. Communication

As a town planner, communication (both written and verbal) was crucial to success. From report writing, emails to meeting with stakeholders to negotiate the best way forward, I communicated every day in some capacity. Likewise, in my time working at the student help desk, 95% of the time involved some communication, and it was far from the usual “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” that we’ve seen from the IT Crowd. Explaining complex town planning terms I would say is equally as challenging as explaining IT terms to someone who may not be all to familiar or is studying English as a second language as I found out. It was a very rewarding experience to be able to those communication skills to another line of work.

2. Research and Analysis

A large part of my studies so far involves research and analysis in terms of new threats, changes/advances in technology, software updates or analysing how an attack occurred (both theoretical and real world) in fact, if a day were to go by without both I don’t think I would sleep easy. Likewise as a town planner my day was also packed with both such as local and state government policy, what a proposed development involved and how it planned to change the land it was going to be built on and the surrounding area in addition to researching former uses. This aspect of planning was probably the easiest for me to transfer into cyber security as it came so naturally to me.

3. Teamwork

Lastly, teamwork. Some may loath but I quite enjoy with the right people as I am currently experiencing this week for a semester long group project building a SOC (more on that in a later blog). Although my first experience working in a team on a large project in a cyber security capacity, I was able to transfer my planning teamwork skills easily. Whether or not they’ll work in the long term is yet to be determined but the aspects of building rapport, assigning roles/deadlines and initial project planning are skills that I am able to apply to my group projects today and into the future.

I could list many more familiar skills in the blog but the above three are ones I will come across the most in my studies and into my career. It was quite eye opening to see how quickly I could pick up the above skills and use them in a different career and how easy a transition it was for me to make. In a funny sort of way, being a town planner almost prepared me for a role in cyber security. More importantly, these are skills that will always be around, always have been and in my opinion will always be the most important in a career.