Community Career Panel: How to Get More than a T-Shirt Working at a Con

so as you can see we have make a new who is going to join us later Cindy Jones Kirsten Renner and myself you know about me cares Cindy tell us a little bit about you sure my name is Cindy Jones I am currently a principal security consultant with rapid7 back on the back wall if you're interested in any kind of prospective hiring opportunity to go there I have been in information security for a while I've been an IT for really long time I have a Microsoft certification number that six digits and starts with a three so I've been in IT for a long time and it evolved to a security program and I've been with rapid7 for about three

and a half years now and I love what I do and Kirsten tell us about you is this working hello Kirsten Renner I'm the director of recruiting at Nevada an advanced analytics and cybersecurity company and to tell you how long I've been doing this the first and only program that I ever wrote was in Visual Basic when Visual Basic was new and exciting and I c'n coding in index cards but that's how long ago my coding career is another story for another day yeah I can do punch cards yeah they're actually my alter-ego is the car hacking village which is I'm thank God I have a Hermione time-turner because I'm actually there right now sorting out boxes so one of the things

we're going to touch on is why volunteer you know a lot of us think that volunteering is cool and you know you're part of the cool kids club to do it but I wanted Kirsten to touch a little bit more on the car hockey village and why you volunteer and then Cindy I love your story about how you got into volunteering so Kirsten oh thank God for my relationship with you because while I've been so passionate about the things that I've learned in the in primarily in the DEFCON community but in the info section community it never occurred to me until we started having these conversations hey these are skills these are I have to manage humans I have

to manage a schedule I have to react to problems when vendors don't show up or things don't work out so it's there's a lot of things that you can translate into actual you know work-related skills and in areas of expertise that are occurring while you're volunteering right so in particular just every little detail and all the things that are gonna pop up that you didn't expect or that you tried to pre-plan for and so forth all these things are gonna you know got to remind people that you are running on volunteer time and and sponsor dollars and everything's not gonna be perfect but by the way 20,000 people are showing up so hope it works out so Cindy tell us

about your volunteering so I've always been somebody who likes to get involved with things I like getting in on the ground floor finding out how things work when I first started getting involved with I mean I've been volunteering since I was probably her own Girl Scout I don't even know it's been forever falling got sucked into a sorority in college and became the head of just about every Scottish forsaken panel that there was there and when I got into IT I would start going to conferences and I was attending a lot but my background is in is it an IT or or in security my background as far as school when I was a psych major

so I intrinsically want to help people right psychology scary as heck I don't want to know about the human mind anymore I found that out going through school but ended up going to shoulda started getting into IT getting into security and when I'd show up at a conference if I didn't know anybody was like hey is there anything I could do to help out what can I do how can I help out because of that I started developing an amazing I mean my contact list is stupid I've got more Chris's in my contact lists than any I know every way if I say Chris right now raise your hand seriously if there's a cribbing I know ICU one to at least three in the

room okay so but you end up getting all these great networking possibilities and options to go ahead and reach out to people to get you know insight into what's going on there feel or if you're interested in checking out their field and what's happening there but my initial intro into volunteerism was started really young it's all because I want to help but what about your first time when you went to DEFCON and I went to DEFCON yeah my first Def Con experience helping out no didn't you go to DEFCON for a while and not volunteer oh yeah okay so that's another thing okay so I spent when I lived overseas for a while and that was a gap in my my

volunteer world and I have been going to Def Con since DEFCON a 13 and I was always before I started building this wonderful list of Chris's my basically been going there and I've been hiding in my room I'm not a really social person believe it or not I mean I know I've probably talked to like at least a third of you guys in the room did it or over the past day and a half I am NOT a social person I love being wildly up being quite happy in my room watching the stream of the talks or going to the talks and going back to my room to recharge or what have you and I realized

I was just taking I was taking a lot so that whole wanting to help people think aspects of my personality I was just ignoring it it wasn't happening so when I finally was able to go ahead and make that connection by wait I need to start giving back a little bit that's how I discovered besides besides was just starting out it was besides the second besides Las Vegas I got involved with us at the very beginning and I'm like let me help with registration what can I do there's one of those things like how can I help what could I do because I really wanted to be able to give something back that in and of itself I actually it allowed

me to learn how to communicate with people it was a starting point of starting to develop some skills that I didn't think I had I was always the one in my room I was always the one being shy now I'm like hey what's up what's your name how you do it you know what do you do who do you work for what's going on with you and just learning how to communicate with people on a level that hopefully is it too intrusive but at the same time just being able to communicate in a means that was effective in your confidence level oh my gosh out there up out the wazoo my job now I'm on a routine basis has to speak

to whether it's you know board members whether it's a c-suite whatever the case may be and tell them basically that their security program sucks and this is how it sucks I am able to go into an organization now and confidently and sit there and explain to them why it is that their baby is ugly you know what's wrong how they can go ahead and fix it and because that is strictly due to the fact that I've practiced communicating with people at all levels at all skill levels in all levels of within organizations in order to be able to express that tool effectively and I did a survey over the last three months of the community to

sort of say okay how many of you are volunteering in the community and what are the skills that you are gaining through that and what was interesting is that teamwork and ability to collaborate was a skill that 82% people were able to say yes this is something that we got organizational skills seventy-five percent said that was one of the major skills that they learned communication were so big on communication can people write can they speak 76% said that that was the major skill that they learned by volunteering planning 75% networking so it was these key skills that were needing in the workplace that were leading in teams that people are automatically learning by volunteering in the community so kirsten sort of put

the recruiters lens on this so when you see someone who volunteers in the community what are some of the things that you're looking for them to say on their resume I see a lot of resumes that say besides be sites be size but that doesn't tell me anything how would someone write their volunteerism on a resume that would pop out for you so before I was doing this earlier I was over there looking at resumes and nine out of ten of the resumes that I looked at I discovered while I was talking to those people that they did thing they did things in the community they did things that aren't on the resume and it's important it's important that you

identify people are like should I talk about my interest should I talk about the things that I'm studying yeah you should you should reveal to us what you're proactively doing to develop yourself and that includes going to conferences and volunteering and and maybe for me because I have been a volunteer for so long maybe it's it's something that I'm looking for but I absolutely think that people should should include that in their in their resume and what I think is interesting is a lot of people just say I volunteer rather than say I'm in charge of sponsorship so I'm in charge of going out and securing funds I'm in charge of overall conference management we're

going to go into that a little bit more but being very specific about talking about are you the subject matter expert that presented are you the person that managed all the volunteers can you delegate can you plan can you organize so don't just say I volunteered add what that business component is now if it's you just showed up for the day that's fine but you showed up you participated you were out there in the community these are all things that you know recruiters are going to be looking for so let's dive a little bit more into conference management Cindy you started beside San Antonio so let's talk a little bit more about what the skills

were that you learned being part of these sites and Antonio and how did you work with your employer on being able to do that so when I first started beside San Antonio I was doing I was working with the government as a contractor the depending on oh how familiar most of y'all are with the government contracting world but you get very limited PTO and there's also very little room for negotiation in those contracts at times so they get paid for having a body in a seat for X number of hours that's all there is to it when you're going above and beyond that you're it's not going to you know and these government agencies and the

contractors that they work with don't receive the same benefit from being involved with a small security conference a localized security conference my bosses were all in DC they really didn't care about security conference in San Antonio because number one they weren't really there in the business of security anyways the number two there in DC they don't that's got no impact on them so working with them in that regard was very difficult I ended up going the hole with PTO when I left my last my last job with the DoD I ended up I think I owed them my last paycheck after my last paycheck it was nothing pretty but for me it was worth it

because I was doing something for the community and that was something that really really mattered to me um since then I've been very fortunate to have handed off besides San Antonio I did that for three years and that was while I was working at DEFCON and while I was doing my job here and while volunteering for the rest of besides Texas organizations DFW and Austin and we had one in Houston so there's a lot happening there when I was involved with that but all that time was on me right this is something I chose to do now since then I've been very very fortunate when I left the DoD world and working as an Air Force contractor I fell into

gratefully to rapid7 and as you can see rapid7 it's pretty present in the community right where we're we're everywhere and there there has never been a case of them not being supported as a matter of fact the reason why I was recruited by rapid7 is because of the community involvement that I had and that was one of the reasons why they hired me they like it when people are getting out there and spreading their word you know perhaps you're going ahead and you know branding your slide deck if you're giving a talk or you know but they know that I am with rapid7 I carry my business cards I hand those out and they're very supportive in that regard

they ensure that I get to conferences most conferences don't pay for so can you drill down a little bit more income prints management you did you know what you were doing when you started be seitan - oh my gosh I had no idea it was such a mess I was really lucky I had some mentors so that was hugely important but I had no idea what to deal with when it came to I didn't realize you just don't think about it right you guys you guys people come to a conference so they're not involved with it there's like wow that's a really cool show look at the cool artwork oh look at you know I register here or they have

sponsors that are doing this people don't have a clue on what goes into conference management these the Santoni was tiny I mean and you look at something like this you're just like it's mind-boggling so the finance management finance management you're dealing with personnel management cuz you have to go ahead and get the crew that's gonna run the event you then have to manage that crew you have to hope that you're finding responsible volunteers which sometimes don't show up yeah that's not a hit on Megan that's not I don't know no no you know we you just you're stuck in a position where you have this has to be done to a certain level of expectation

that you set for yourself and it doesn't always work out the way you want but you learn so much dealing with people gathering money oh my goodness I'm horrible at it I learned this because I dive in headfirst got it done but oh my gosh so difficult so Kirsten talk to us a little bit more about you know if you saw all of the things that Cindy does now would that turn you off as to her for thinking that she's going to be out in the community and not doing her job or how can you drill down in interviews and find out the skills that she has been using I mean would you find that

valuable in her beyond her technical skills so from a recruiting perspective I I have an unfair advantage in in the lens that I'm looking through I realized that just organizing a village is not the same thing as organizing an entire conference but the volume of people that we have coming in and the the amount of things we have to deal with today we realized this morning we realized oh crap we need insurance and we aren't sure if we have all the dedicated power grids that we need for all the things that we're gonna be plugging in and we don't want to blow up the Flamingo maybe probably so for me I'm gonna look I'm gonna look through a

different lens right but typically if you as the candidate or as a potential candidate are able to articulate all the many things that she was describing or that anybody that is is volunteering even if you're just strictly the person managing the sponsorship if you're oh my god did anybody think about up lighting is that a thing do we need that do we want it to be dark and and why are we just feel realizing this now a year you know a year into it so for me I I encourage people to make sure that you are able to articulate those things find a volunteer at a place like this higher ground in particular that can help you

articulate those things on your resume but I can't imagine any recruiter worth their salt that isn't gonna see value in your volunteer time the fact that you are outside of the things that you have to do this is what I say to students this is what I say to engineers at every level tell me about the things that you're doing that help you develop professionally that you didn't have to do that you're not getting paid to do that your coursework didn't require you to do right I know recruiter worth it isn't gonna see great value in that so one thing that I always recommend and I rarely see anyone doing this is any volunteering that you do take a few

moments after your shift after the time that you're there and write down what you did so this this pertains to volunteering for the day this pertains to a competition it's keeping that sort of journal of did I do you know deconflict a situation did I verbalize something in a way that someone else understood it did it was there a technical problem that no one knew how to solve that I was able to solve it's really being able to create those real-life experiences that you can share in an interview because how many of us have gone into an interview and they say explain to me a time when you learned something new yeah can I talk to that

right now go ahead oh my gosh okay I don't know how many of you were impacted by the kerfuffle with the badges yesterday okay it was a mess I thank you for your patience we appreciate you I basically had to stand in front of a line of people and say there will be no walking badges go home and that was devastating for me this is like this is I've been here forever this is my con people come in yes this is awesome and they had to kick people out and they don't care what I'm feeling they're like well thing I've been sitting here since 6:00 this morning what the heck's going on so to be able to say that I D escalated that

to a certain degree and assisted with that in that matter that's that's a major skill that I wouldn't have had if it wasn't for the the participation that I have here I basically had to tell about 300 people get out and then I got to welcome them back with open arms afterwards which was wonderful but that's besides the point and and you're gonna go home and write about that Laurie oh and you know any sign motion so good yeah I I think you have to understand that these are real-life experiences that you're going to be able to use in talking in an interview and a face-to-face interview being able to talk about it when you're on a phone

screen I know we're running out of time but I'm still going to move a little bit farther so competitions it's interesting that many recruiters are now starting to look at which competitions are you part of and really looking at are you learning the skills that you need in the competition so I would highly recommend that if you're in a competition even if you didn't win it definitely list it on your social media profile definitely listed on your resume and also be sure again to look at it after the end of the competition rather than you know high-fiving we won having that beer definitely say okay what was the technical skill that I learned what did

I mess up on you know what did I fail we learn more when we fail than when we succeed who how did I communicate with other people because you're actually in an environment where there's a time crunch there's a resource crunch it's a problem you've never seen before and you're working with people that you've never worked with before gee what does that sound like that sounds like work okay that's real life so why are you not journaling those situations so that yes you may not have all of the work experience that the job is asking for that you can say on your resume but if you've done 10 to 12 competitions I'm sorry but that

translates into work experience because you've been in that work environment if you're looking to get into another industry if you're looking to get into another skill set broaden your horizons go to the car hacking village go to cyber 912 which is a cyber policy CTF go to any other CTF so you can expand your knowledge if you're looking to move into another industry really consider going to the CTF there because not only are you gonna learn the skills you're also going to network and we all know the number one way to find a job is networking the other thing and I'm going to ask Kirsten to talk about this as well as presentations so you may not be

the person that wants to you know de-escalate 300 people having to walk out the door you may not be the person that wants to be in competitions but you do like to present now Kirsten what would you look at if someone presented a lot what what does that say to you do you say oh I don't want to talk to them or do you say I do want to talk to them it it just so happens that when we did our coffee papers you know we had to look at a lot or presentations and then all those presentations had to be scrubbed so that I guess I need to remember to put that on my resume that I

could scrub presentations you know it takes bravery to write it the people that are smiling may be me maybe you maybe we're tired maybe we're nervous imposter syndrome it's a thing google it like it sometimes you feel terrified like why do I even deserve to be here why mine expert writes all normal stuff right so the majority of the people perform you know that are that are getting up that are doing their presentations they may they may something say something you don't agree with you can collaborate with them they're taking the time there they're not probably not getting paid to do it but they're putting together their presentation and there's a lot of planning that goes into

that the one time you made me put an actual recruit DC actually put some slides together I can't tell you how much I stressed over every little graphic is are people gonna laugh at that is that funny is that cute is that relevant right a lot goes into it right so absolutely and I also will encourage you if maybe it doesn't make sense for you to be in a competition you can still you can still go to them and you go to the talks too right there's so much to learn and besides the competitions and the in the CTS and the cool prizes and all that stuff it definitely shows that you worked on a team and some of the

best lessons my unsolicited favorite question for if you're recruiting that you should ask and if you're the candidate that you should volunteer before you get asked and I know I told this to a couple people today talk about your failures right you don't put it on your resume you don't say I messed up the thing but so you talk about your accomplishments you're gonna reveal so much about yourself when you describe give your testimony to the thing that broke - the thing that blew up - the thing that didn't work do you blame others do you do you figure it out you learn from it are you prepared in the future to not blow up

the robot so I would recommend to think about catch your your interviewer off-guard and and talk about what you did and how it didn't work and what you learned from it because everybody makes mistakes so the one thing I would say about presentations realize that it takes a lot more time management than you would think so understanding that you know the RSA if you're gonna submit for an RSA they close tomorrow yeah and and that just went out this morning I don't know how many of us missed you know that the deadlines for tomorrow yeah that socks right in the middle of yeah but understanding that one of the reasons why people think that presenting

is a hand-picked Club and it's not it is be someone who puts through a defined outline of what their gonna speak about they know when to submit it they know how to fill it out correctly I can tell you there is not a uniform way of filling out a proposal submission one of the most difficult that I've had to do even more difficult than RSA has been Grace Hopper and it was it's an eight section proposal and it's great because then it's now my foundation for every single other you know conferences I submit to which is you know I did all that work in a week so but realize if you're going to present if you have to engage your

employer or not I know that one of our resume career coaches over there we had to engage her employer nine months ago to make sure that she could present here and then you can also decide do you want your employer to know that you're presenting or are you doing it on your own and that's your own decision so we're going to move into some final thoughts here because a theme today is sort of underlining theme has been burnout and one thing that happens when I did the survey 80% of the people who said that they do volunteering they said it stresses them out and what was interesting is that they said that they would kill still do it but 80% of the

community says that burnout stress is a major part of them volunteering it's back stress it's headaches it's migraines it's anxiety it's depression and they still do it so one of the things that I want Cindy to sort of touch on is how you look at delegating your succession and how you look at how you move on because the one thing that I will say is if you tend to burn a bridge in a volunteer situation you are probably doing the exact same thing in your career you are probably taking you're probably going much farther than you should and then you're doing the high middle finger and walking out and trying to find a next job the other day rather

than planning your exit so Cindy how did you plan your exit would be site San Antonio or any other situation so with b-side San Antonio my first year there as I mentioned I had a spectacular mentor Michael Gough was with besides Austin at the time and he was just feeding me information hey you need a time this need to time naive needed time that so he basically trained me which was wonderful I with his help and what I thought was the help of a committee which ended up not being a committee even the guy who was only supposed to get the beer moved out of town and didn't even find the beer for me didn't

even source it it's horrible so that I ended up doing that with mice myself with his assistant so the next year I had to planned out I knew how I could go about doing it I tried making a couple of key people who seemed as passionate as I was about it by the beginning of the planning cycle for the third year I knew I needed to step back three years doing an entire conference on your own is exhausting the stress levels were ridiculous the amount of time it was taking me to take off of work I didn't share that with anyone and I was fortunate enough to have somebody involved kind of on the periphery but a

lot of that was my fault because I was a very good at delegation yet that was willing to take it on and I basically kind of said hey by the way this is my last year here you go about a year out so he had a year to get used to the idea and a year to object to it so I was very fortunate in that regard mm-hmm other scenarios are much more touchy I think I think you know you're basically the Wikipedia for your subject right so for instance here I lead registration for besides Elvia I ran registration or been a part of registration since besides lv2 that's been a while I've got the historical

knowledge me and three other people are the oldest tenured staff members here I've got the historical knowledge how do I hand that off if I were to say next year is my last year who do I hand that off to do you groom staff members and are they willing to stay on after you leave you know I mean you end up building a pretty tight team it's just like any other organization but because it's volunteer work it's I don't want to say it's easier to step back from but there's more I think it's a higher likelihood that a team of people would remove themselves than in a paid position so it's it's looking at succession planning and leadership

planning and it brings back to the point that someone is not responsible for your career you are responsible for your career and you are responsible for having that conversation with your manager as to where you go in your company and if you're in a volunteer position you need to have the risk you need to be responsible enough to say I'm starting to get burned out I'm starting to get tired a lot of us who get involved in the community say no one can survive without me I'm going down with the ship and that is where burnout happens you have to say I'm at this point where I'm tired I'm still having fun and I need to

plan it about two years out and let the people know don't hold it as a secret and say oh by the way tomorrow's my last day I think you know we would all get shot if we did that or something like that sorry I shouldn't have said that we would all have people get very upset so Kirsten I know you've been involved in a variety of things how do you handle sort of succession planning or handing things off or delegating or do you not do that I could that's an area where I can definitely improve and I'll just going to be honest with you delegating is also an area where I I don't want to say I struggle or that I

don't get it right it's part of Management everyday but asking for help is something that you need to but you're like wait on the helper learning how to ask for help right is it sometimes a struggle I have a new year's resolution three years running that I will do less and not overextend myself and I'm not going to call out any conference in particular but there's one there's a lot of conferences happening the week of summer camp and one of them I'm not attending you can see me here and you'll see me somewhere else in a couple days but I just I'm not stepping foot over there I'm just done it just for me it's

exhausting it's it's it's too much so you have to you have to that's its humility - right - to realize when you've reached your limitations and then - it's your own time management also right besides the resources and the vendors and all the things that you need you need to manage yourself so you have to give in a little bit surrender so this is the last presentation for a higher ground and before I start crying because you know this is always a labor of love do we have any questions about volunteering or do we want to just have a offline not videotaped conversation about this afterwards what's the vote no questions okay thank you so much for listening to our

conversation it has actually been videotaped as well we're going to be doing this presentation again at Derby con we actually have all of the Community Survey data about community volunteering and career development that we're going to be releasing there thank you so much and thank you for being part of higher ground yeah [Applause]