Close Community Based Career Development

besides DC would like to thank all of our sponsors and a special thank you to all of our speakers volunteers and organizers for making 2018 a success so that that is what we were told to do to say when we are going to get started so good morning thank you for coming to the first session of track number three my name is Kathleen Smith and this is community-based Career Development and one of the reasons why we wanted to talk about this is most of the conference's that happen within the information security information assurance cybersecurity community all are volunteer run and it's interesting that as an industry we really rely on volunteers to get a lot of things done

but many people are not looking at their volunteering through a career development lens and a lot of companies are not looking at community volunteering as a way to recruit people coming into their community coming into their companies so I've been volunteering in the community anywhere from 7 to 10 years and my background is in recruitment marketing my name is Kathleen Smith and I am the chief marketing officer of a company called clear jobs net and cybersex jobs comm and in my volunteering I've had the great honor of meeting with so many people who devote so many hours to putting on amazing conferences like this besides or like Def Con or hacker halted or a variety of conferences throughout

the community but no one has actually talked about how this helps you with your career so I've asked two really great volunteers to step forward and sort of share their story but then we also have one of our volunteers Doug Munro who is also a recruiter who has been in this community and how he would recommend people look at their volunteering for career development so our volunteers are Cindy Jones and Doug Munro and I'm going to have them introduce themselves Cindy go it's halfway mention my name is Cindy Jones I am a principal security consultant with rapid7 I have been in the information security field for about thirteen years now and in an IT for a

much longer period of time Mike volunteer career paths has been interesting it was definitely an evolution and we'll get into some details behind that in a little bit but oh my god okay so here we go let's go through all the lists of the annual conferences I I volunteer at b-sides event in Texas I live in San Antonio currently so a lot of besides events in Texas I run registration for B sighs Las Vegas it's about a I don't know it's a half time job through most of the year through the conference run second in charge for workshops for Def Con I am called upon staff for Derby con Def Con shine I forgot about Def Con shine oh my

gosh yeah so I worked Def Con China for the beta this past year and have every intention of going back this year there's a lot of a lot of things happening and luckily I'm very fortunate in regards to how I'm able to support this desire for myself to maintain constant integration with the community through volunteerism so we'll talk about that later too I am Doug Monroe I am the director of talent acquisition from mag aerospace humble brag for us we are the fastest growing aerospace company in the world we focus primarily on intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance but as you can imagine cyber is a big component of that as well as some of the other

operations that we do prior to this I was in similar roles with coal fire and the former verus group and I've been fortunate through Kathleen primarily to be able to attend a number of events like this and one of the really exciting things from a recruitment standpoint is that I don't think that there is enough conversation that goes on like this between jobseekers candidates even just employees trying to further their career and recruiters and management as to how the things that they do have the things that you do in can impact your career in a positive way so this is it's an absolute pleasure for me I've been here a number of times number of other events nationally and

locally and it's just it's a kick I love talking to people here so what are we going to be talking about today so one is community involvement why do it a lot of people are saying you know all I hear about is volunteering as folding t-shirts or doing a bake sale or doing a you know a car wash or something like that but as you look at large conferences like this there is so much that goes on behind the scenes there's a lot of things that you see during the day people running around with their bunny ears or their t-shirts but there's a lot that goes on this is a year-long conference in the making so what we're

going to talk about in specific today is conference management presenting and competitions and we're also going to have Doug share with us sort of what does a recruiter look at when he's looking at that experience when he's talking to you in an interview or looking at your resume we're also going to have Cindy and Doug touch on how would you engage your employer when you're talking about community volunteering some of the things that you may learn skills wise you may think that you know I don't need to know how to run registration but there are other skills that you can learn specifically communication program management finance there's a lot of different things to think about and finally how to handle

stress a lot of people think that this is easygoing and it is not it is an entirely new level of stress and if you've seen any of the studies that are done out there now Jack Daniel variety of other people big in the community we all have stress and then on top of it we volunteer and we add to the stress and throughout the presentation I'm actually going to be sharing some results that we have found I just completed a national global study on community volunteering and what people have learned to help their career and some of the things that they've found to lower their stress so one of the things that came through from

the survey that we did was the different kind of skills people felt that they learned by doing community volunteering I remember these are all technical people who are looking for other skills too so collaboration and teamwork really important in this day and age a lot of you know lone guns is is not what we're looking at we're looking at people who can collaborate with strangers communication skills how do I translate what I need to someone who has not the same experience I do organizational skills there are 1800 people here today that is a lot to organize and figure out how to get it going networking networking is going to be the number one way you're going to find a

job and it is interesting people like well I know people that I you know know through D&D or I know people who I've met at the beer hall or something like that being able to expand your network through volunteering in the community is a really great way to find your next job other things time management delegation commitment management leadership all these different skills that people are learning by volunteering what was interesting to me is employer support so a lot of times people don't even share with their employer that they're doing this volunteering they just know that you're distracted at work rather than being able to say hey I'm doing this other thing so 62 percent of the people in this

survey were actually provide paid time to volunteer so this is a real big cute engage your employer in these discussions fifty-nine percent said that they stayed with their employer because of this support so if you're an employer and you're looking for retention being sure that your employees understand that you will pay them to volunteer and be ambassadors within the community and volunteer support is one thing that people look at when they're looking for a new job or if you're not it is something that you might want to look at so since we're here at this very large conference we're going to turn it over to Cindy otherwise known as registration goddess as far as her conference

management your sort of career track how you started how you engaged your employer how you handled your paid time off and you know I'll prime you with you missed absolutely so as I mentioned before I run the registration team for besides Las Vegas and if any of you have attended beef sized Las Vegas you've seen probably I think we have about 15 different badge types running around each one of these has a separate way to register a separate potential donation value for their badges it's insane so a lot of things go into running that prior to that I also ran besides San Antonio small conference it was great you know as a I mean we've probably had

300 people but through engaging in these efforts the skills that I learned that I've been able to translate back to you know day-to-day business use have been innumerable for example managing people I've always had small teams working for me probably for the past I don't know 15 years or so you know teams of like six or seven and it wasn't necessarily at the level of dealing with their pay grade but you know just you'll managing people making sure tasks were getting done on time that all changed when all of a sudden I've got a crew of 40 volunteers that I need to go ahead and have you know taking care of things and you know

entering all the tasks getting done so that was challenging but it's something that I didn't have the opportunity to dive into until I was in a volunteer environment nobody's gonna trust me was 40 something people because I've never done it before well now I have and being able to express this to my employer was it was amazing it was it's spectacular they were so excited to hear about it and they said well it's only for one day I'm like no no no let me tell you about my path through the course of the year in getting this conference going so well managing people was a huge skill managing a budget I was treasurer for my

Girl Scout Troop I think I was like 14 at the time that doesn't count you know you're talking about literally bake sale money then this in this case I'm dealing with this it was a relatively small budget it was only $20,000 but I dealt with this on an annual basis and I always came in within 300 dollars of that budget that's a skill I never knew I had that skill I could barely balance my own checkbook but when it comes to somebody else's money I got this so that was fun learning that being able to translate that into spending for other events and now expanding upon that to larger events as well besides Las Vegas this year is going to

be expanding how we're handling things internal the organization so that's going to be a challenging thing so I don't know that was another area where I wouldn't have the opportunity you know I to manage money like that that to manage how things were spent and I always wanted everything to be perfect so that's a that's a fault there yeah big stressful since we're here in the DoD Center when you started beside San Antonio how did you explain that to your employer and how did you engage them so besides being basically the grouse grassroots you know effort that it is throughout every almost every arena my goal is to bring community to San Antonio I hadn't seen a lot of that at

the time I was a DoD contractor I my bosses were all here they had no idea what was going on in San Antonio they didn't really care from a an employer support perspective I didn't get any it was out of sight out of mind it wasn't gonna benefit them in any way shape or form as far as they were concerned they didn't know what skills I was gonna be gaining when I could bring back to my position because of those skills they didn't have a clue I used up all my leave time used up all my sick time going to conferences organizing the conference when in the red from leave time actually I had my paycheck docked

within one contract roll into the next one because I didn't have any leave time left so that happened there huge transition went from doing DoD contracting to working for a pin 7 which is a position that I got because of community involvement they came to me recruited me which was awesome that's a very huge ego boost by the way but and they were like no we want you because of your community involvement so I said ok so what does this mean what is this gonna mean to me and they said well we'll pay for you to go to conferences and they do about every conference I want to go to unless it's something I don't want them

necessarily to be involved with they support me in all my volunteer efforts obviously I still have a job to get done so I get my job done but then it's my times mine so Doug explained to us if Cindy came to you as a job seeker as a candidate and she didn't have any of her volunteering on her resume but you heard about it during the discussion how would you recommend she would put conference management on her resume and how would you want to hear about it in an interview well it's two different things and obviously a little plug for later this afternoon we are going to be doing resume reviews and different people will

say different things but I would tend to say it should be on your resume within the bounds of reason if you are a very active volunteer you might not want to have a full page of it or you might want to have a link on your resume that would take us to a different page but it should definitely be listed and then it's gonna be incumbent upon you to notice when the opportunity is to begin to speak about it if we're asking you if you let a team and if so what was the project well besides any professional experience you have in that regard you can bring up the volunteering to the point that Kathleen made and what

Cindy's alluded to all of those skills translate if you are speaking at a conference if you're on a panel it if you're organizing if you're doing registration all of these things require skills to translate into any other part of the job that you're doing and I want to know about it because it's gonna be the same questions that I ask if you tell me about some pentesting effort that you led I'm gonna ask you specific questions about what you did what were the obstacles that you faced how did you overcome them I'm gonna do the same thing with the volunteerism because those skills are just as vital and I think something that often gets lost in

technical fields and certainly cyber is absolutely that is that your audience is not always technical they're going to need to hear things at multiple levels of understanding so your ability to speak to a broad audience and convey the information that you have that they need is vital and all of this sort of experience both the organization but also that the presentation of ideas and information is vital to your career path and it does translate so I would say again make sure it's on the resume I tend to recommend you put it at the end but there will be opportunities where you can make the connection hey they're asking me about this I did this with besides DC and

we'll talk about it so what's interesting is it's not necessarily just listing the conference's on your resume or on your social media profile but it's actually listing the role that you played and then if it is a major role like what Cindy's been doing conference management finance securing sponsorship handling volunteers those are different things that you're going to want to list I mean a lot of people think volunteer management is very easy and it is one of the hardest things to do because you don't have a carrot or stick with the people who are supposed to show up I mean I don't know if you saw my Twitter feed over the last few days but there

were a lot of volunteers who were supposed to show up for tomorrow's event to help out here and they all bailed okay how do you as a manager how do you as someone who you know you can't penalize them for not showing up but you have to scramble and you have to find people to show up well what's interesting is being able to translate that on your resume as people manage being able to say that you're a leader that people do show up when you ask them to show up and you can held them accountable but Doug can you touch a little bit on if you see someone is listing and me if you saw Cindy's

conference schedule which DEF CON Shana DEFCON be Stein's Las Vegas Derby con hacker halted b-side Santonio b-side to Nashville all of the different ones wouldn't you think that you're just paying for her to go to all these conferences I do have a different perspective because of course I've known enough people that do volunteer at that level that I would tend to look at it differently but there are recruiters and managers hiring managers who might look at it in that way so again I would say if you've got a full page of these things you might want to cherry-pick the ones that are really significant and where your role is significant and where your role can

translate into other things that you do but as a recruiter personally I look at it as the involvement I will assume that rapid7 is happy with the work that Cindy puts out or else you wouldn't be working there anymore so you're dead so it again becomes a strength you're able to manage a full time job with full time responsibilities full time expectations and yet you are still active in the community and broadening your skills all of that is a positive so another aspect of community involvement not necessarily community volunteering is competitions and I will have lots of students there people who are looking to get into the industry say I have no experience but they'll say that they've been part of

lots of competitions and I think this is a very big overlooked not looked at very clearly area where people don't realize that they can gain experience but some of the things that they don't realize is you know when you go in to a competition you have a time constraint you have a resource constraint you are meeting new people that you don't know and you're trying to communicate with them in a stressful situation I don't know about you but that sounds like my everyday work day at you know my nine-to-five job so if you're able to relate those same skills those same challenges that you have in a competition on your resume you may not have the work experience but you

actually have the community experience so be sure that whenever you're part of a competition you actually take a few moments after the competition and say okay what was the challenge what did I learn what did I mess up and what was the overall situation because you're going to go into an interview or a phone interview and you're going to be asked what was the situation that you messed up on and you may not remember that but you may remember something in a competition that you didn't remember it's also an opportunity to expand your network you're sitting across the table from somebody and the person at the other cross the table you guys click I hope that rather than after the

competition and high-fiving and grabbing a beer you guys are actually talking about hey what company do you work with do they support you being part of here realize that your overall competition network is one that's going to help you in your skill set so Doug you've done some recruiting through competitions you want to talk a little bit more about your how you look at competitions on a resume or in a social media profile well you took everything I had Kathleen I'm sorry so and those couple and those couple of folks that are leaving have no idea what they're about to miss what having said that Kathleen is absolutely right and and not only those softer

skills that she's relating to that we've already touched on but this is specific this is industry specific you are performing tasks that you could perform in a professional setting it's vital I'm gonna ask every single question that she just asked what was your role what were the challenges what went right what went wrong so gathering your notes afterwards is significant because all of those questions are going to come up but I look at it again as it is community involvement more importantly it's an ongoing effort to broaden your skills try new things and honestly doesn't matter if you come in first or 30th you're typically gonna be part of a team it's what you did within that role and

very often in these competitions you'll start out with a team of three or four and somebody's going to drop out that's a key moment what did you do to overcome so you don't have to win everything you just have to play the game and all of those things are very important to us when we evaluate and particularly if you don't necessarily have as much professional experiences somebody else who might be doing this but I can't emphasize enough goes for IT in general but it really goes to cyber it is such a fluid industry it's a constant back-and-forth adversaries and good guys and because it's so ever-changing if you're just gonna get your degree and get a couple of certifications and kind

of glide through your career you may do okay but you're gonna fall behind the people that are going out competing broadening their skills though the ones we want they have a passion for it because that's ultimately cybersecurity is every bit as vital as the well the floating platforms that my company employs it is the defense of everything we hold dear so if you don't have a passion for it and aren't trying to push yourself forward you're probably not going to be as successful and you're probably not the person that we want and when apples-to-apples everything else is about the same between you and someone else that's going to win every single time we had a really interesting

question at a previous presentation when someone said well I can't get to all of the competitions how can our and I can't get to you know B sites DC to be able to volunteer well there is this thing called the Internet and there is this thing about doing it online so Cindy and I both volunteer for B sites Las Vegas everything is done through slack email and phone calls we only see each other ass at the actual conference so if you want to be a volunteer to any of these conferences or if you want to compete realize that a lot of this is already done online you can be gaining your experience online without even having to

be face to face the other thing is if you're looking to switch industries this is also a really great way to build experience and expand your network there's a cyber policy T CTF there is the car hacking there are energy CTF so I mean there is an a CTF for almost every single industry so if you're looking to poke your head into switching industries you might want to look at one of the online CTS so Cindy we're gonna have you switch gears and talk a little bit more about presenting okay so everyone thinks that oh it's just the cool kids club that gets picked to stand up here and get a speaker badge Cindy you want to explain what it takes

to present it Derby or Grace Hopper or [Laughter] yeah that's a little bit of an inside joke yeah we weren't diverse enough which is a totally different thing anyways and being able so one of the things you have to be willing to do is accept some rejection that's all there is to it you're gonna get knows you're gonna get knows I know some people who every single conference they've submitted to they've been accepted like what is your magic sauce I don't understand this you're gonna get rejected from a lot of conferences you're get rejected from conferences that you volunteer out that you think well they know who I am don't they want to pick me yeah it's not about

the cool kids people there's a lot of conspiracy theories that there's a huge amount of nepotism and you'll see the cool kids speaking a lot of the time because they know how to work the system they know how to present their ideas in a manner that the CFP Review Board is gonna say this sounds like a logical flow a logical talk topic and the people will be interested in this they've been doing it enough to where it automatic Ida by-road happens automatically for them as they're writing these things out that takes practice if you don't get the practice in and get rejected it's just no it's okay you can move forward and continue again if you can ask for

feedback for those rejections a lot of times they'll give you feedback Grace Hopper said we weren't diverse enough okay I saw the I saw the submission it looked pretty darn good to me but that's cool so you know ask for the feedback take the feedback they're not saying anything to be mean to you they're just telling you how you might improve your submission yeah that's okay so another perspective that you need to go ahead and consider so once you've gotten accepted right you've got went ahead and you've drawn up this outline they may have asked you for your slides in advance you're probably gonna alter your slides in advance or at least at least get a

very solid detailed outline now you're you have and you've been accepted so now you know in two months three months whenever the case might be you've got to basically write this talk you only have to write this talk you have to be able to present this talk in order to present this talk you need to practice you need to practice practice practice if you're putting this off for too long and some of us might be really good at procrastinating not oh my gosh because all of a sudden it's two weeks before the event you haven't written the slide yet oh my gosh so this is something else you need to work on and build from

practicing speaking in front of people can be challenging for a lot of us I mean we an industry I think primarily I mean if we were to do the research I think it shows a lot of us are introverts getting up and speaking on a stage in front of a group of people especially your peers that's terrifying for a lot of folks it's really not that bad they're there to hear what you have to say because they're interested in what your opinion is so that's brilliant that's a great opportunity for you to be able to expand outside of your comfort zone and build as a human being so the other thing about presentations is knowing the CFP

timeline I mean I just finished doing all of my presentations proposals for you know besides San Francisco and RSA which are next March so if you're not doing the research and the time management of being able to think of a year from now what topic do I want to talk about you're not going to be able to figure out sort of the timeline of submitting your proposals and as Cindy said you have to be able to write what you're speaking about in six different ways you have to be able to do a short abstract you have to do a long abstract you then have to convince the CFP review board as to why this is important those

are the three things I had to do for besides San Francisco and then also what are some of the objectives that you want the audience to get through there are many many different platforms I wish I could say that there was one way to submit a CFP but there isn't so you have to keep in mind okay I really like this conference next June is that con or Circle City con being keeping an eye on either their Twitter handle or their website when they say a call for a call for papers is out and then actually take down the form of what you're going to have to fill out because sometimes it's a Google Form sometimes it's a

conference management software sometimes it is something that's completely you know just an Excel spreadsheet a lot of times in the industry the proposals are stripped of who is presenting their their social media profile everything it is just based on your content so it isn't just hey I did this really great patch and I want to share it with the world it is being articulate enough to be able to convey your thoughts in 200 words or 500 words and then being able to spend time on google images and figure out what image you want for your presentation I am you know horrible I will spend my procrastination is being on Google Images and trying to figure

out what sort of image is out there so I change that all the time and as Cindy said it's a lot of rejection and it's understanding that you might have your your feelings constantly hurt because you think that they don't like you you are not conveying your ideas in a way that your industry peers can understand it that is a learning opportunity so Doug let's talk a little bit about someone who's a big presenter you know we had Megan who is on our panel before talk about how she submits for all of these different conferences what do you what do you want to see what do you want to hear from a candidate that says I

present every where do you want to hear about you know what a great speaker they are or do you want to go a little bit deeper to be honest I would assume if they're getting the call that many times they are a good speaker it's more significant to me that it's the preparation its it is that content preparation it is creating something as I spoke about a moment ago that a broad audience can understand and grasp and that when I say broad not just that dummies like me that don't understand the technical aspects of it but peers so if you're able to put together that content in a constructive way that you can convey to people that's significant

to me I'm gonna ask you how you did it what was the reaction how did the audience take it what sort of questions were they asking but then also going back to the things that didn't work what did you learn from them how did you become a better presenter because at the end of the day and that's something that run into all the time because it is such a technical field there are folks who are brilliant can do extraordinary things back into things that they really shouldn't just for sport none of it matters if you can't put it into a format that somebody else has to can take value from and at the end of the day with coal

fire we were the leading FedRAMP Assessor anyway yeah so you had to have the technical skills to be able to conduct the assessment but it didn't matter because the deliverable the thing that gets paid for the thing that keeps all of the lights on keeps us paid goes to a customer who may or may not have the level of expertise that's a key element so if you're presenting you're creating content you're creating something that others can take in and get value from that is very similar to the deliverables that you ultimately have to produce for customers and so those those are the areas that I'm probably going to ask you about and that's where the presentation skills

come in handy not to mention when you're trying to get business when you're the SME that's standing next to the sales guy and you're trying to explain why your company your team is the best one to give them what they need you're gonna have to present you're gonna maybe it's a small room with a half a half-dozen executives maybe it's a huge room whatever it is if you've done it that's significant to us the other thing to think about when you're doing presentations is understanding if you're representing your employer or not and that is a big question that you have to make the internal decision on and maybe speak to some of your co-workers or your

manager if you're presenting at a conference and if you're expressing their views or not that's very interesting in this industry a lot of people choose not to let everyone know where they work they choose not to use their business handle or anything like that but it's also going back to your company and saying I have something that I want to present about and start negotiating the process within your company if they're going to support you in your presentations or not you are an ambassador for them if you're talking about the work that you're doing and if it's non-cleared work you might be you know surprised they might want to support you in doing this when we were

doing this presentation at Derby con we had someone who is on the panel who learned her skills through competitions she works for a large financial institution it took nine months to get approval for her present at Derby con so I actually submitted the proposal to her last year to go up her chain to management so you need to understand who needs to have approval within your company to be able to present and then ask them you know what kind of support not only or will they pay for your travel or pay for your conference are they going to help you create the competitive presentation are they gonna help you with the practicing you might be surprised at how much

support you would get within the company when I did a workshop two years ago to get more women into the community presenting one of the people who was in that workshop was a woman who said I have all of these ideas but I have never put them down in an abstract she went home from the workshop and put together six abstracts and then make made a goal for 2017 to present 12 times and she actually did and her company a very very large commercial integrator paid for her to go to Brazil to Spain all over the world because she was brilliant but she was such an introvert and didn't want to get out there and realize that this was

a huge growth opportunity for her and it actually led to her you know being able to find another job so you know of all of the kinds of community volunteering or being involved in the community presentations I would say would be one of the hardest but it is also something that pushes you out of your comfort zone and gives you opportunities to learn presentation skills being able to write your thoughts being able to convey to non-technical people so let's talk about the other aspect of volunteering stress so what's interesting is when I did this survey 98 percent of the people said that they found community involvement very fulfilling but at the same time more than half of them also shared it

stressed them out ninety-four percent of them actually believed that it had a positive impact on the community and I found that this was really very enlightening to me cuz we hear so much negativity about our community we hear so many bad things out there yet we are the one community that is most driven by community involvement and volunteering and I think it's great that most of the community feels even though they're stressed out with volunteering even though they're stressed out by you know having managing different time lines and if volunteers are going to show up people still volunteer they still want to go out into the community whoops sorry but I find it very interesting that

there is actually nothing out there that helps us with our stress a lot of people talk about the stress that they feel is psychological anxiety depression these are all the things the people you see running around here who are so happy are actually some of the people who are the most depressed or have the most anxiety but they're out there all the time yes yeah we realize getting out into the community is a way to overcome a lot of that but Cindy you want to touch on some of the stressful points that you have felt with besides San Antonio or even going to DEFCON China yeah and you know that was a whole different ball how did

you handle your personal development of going from being miss perfectionist to letting things go so when I first joined the information security hacker community whatever you want to call it I was very much I'd go to a talk at DEFCON and I go back to my room the people were not something I want to interact with necessarily I didn't want to be involved with the thing I wanted to learn and I did then I took and I took and I took and it was wonderful I did well when they started doing the streaming I did start watching with streaming so I didn't even have to go to the rooms which was great I realized that that is not a healthy

you know a little epiphany happened it's not necessarily a healthy way to live your life is taking all the time so I decided to give back and the easiest way for me to give back were just say hey do you guys need any help it also put me in a position where I was putting myself in groups of people that normally would not interact with in any way shape or form these are people that just were you know they weren't my stand but folks not a big deal but it was taking a risk in that regard and it was a success successful risk wow that was hard I met my tribe you know all through

college people say oh you finally meet your people well I never met my people I met my people at def con I met my people you know volunteering for besides Austin the first year that was there I met my people at places like this rooms like this with people like you which was awesome so I started giving back and that I am a type-a personality so if I start doing something I really do something so I jumped in with both feet so it started off I was just gonna go ahead and work with besides Austin I'll volunteer level hey Cindy you know we'd really like to have a b-side sound San Antonio would you be interested in doing that no no no

no okay yeah let's do this so it became this thing and I became an obsessive volunteer I was already working for besides Las Vegas said that by that point and I just took on beside San Antonio ahead spectacular support network had I not I would have crashed and burned chillin with personnel issues there I took everything on myself because the people that I had requested help from we're not able to step up and do how do things the way I would anticipate them being done because I have a perfectionist so that was another skill that I learned just have like those things but yeah I became a little bit obsessive with that and taking things on when I continued to do so I

have a hard time saying no yeah I I think that is one of our biggest challenges within the community is saying no and thinking that we need to do it all and I think that that is a lot of times that people you know become siloed because they believe that they need to do it all and they need to do the job perfectly and what you find when you're in a community engagement when you're in the community you realize there are other people you can lean on especially if they are strangers so what's interesting that I always ask people when they come to volunteer with me is what are the other things that you're looking for what are the growth

opportunities that you're looking for and one of the things that is not taught in our careers in any careers is succession planning how do you move on from this particular role Cindy is no longer part of b-side San Antonio but she had to think I had at the time who is going to take over the organization two years two years I mean and why don't you talk a little bit more about how you handled succession planning him I mean did they teach you that at rapids oh no that was actually pre rapid7 so no absolutely not but I did learn it through my volunteer work and creating this little this I call it I called it my baby it was my

baby I was the one doing all the work for beside San Antonio like I said 300 person conference not a big deal not a huge budget but still something I had put my heart and soul into as well as all my pto so when i realized that it was becoming a little bit much for me and with the understanding that i was having a difficult time delegating aspects of it I decided to start planning for handing the tour trio basically passing the baton along that made it easier for me to help delegate it helped me delegate a little bit more knowing that this is gonna be a responsibility of somebody else coming down the line so that was additional

that was very helpful and I was super fortunate to select for my successor a great guy who has taken this conference and as I mentioned it took two years to do this but he has taken this conference from you know a little 300 person conference to about 500 people we've got villages we've got I mean so much wonderful is going on there and to see it grow and I can say I started this and it's so much better now and that's so satisfying I mean my whole goal in life is to help people and to make things better and when I see something that actually has gotten better because of something I started super satisfying

from a personal perspective so Doug do you want to touch on you know just sort of these management skills and how do you want those convey in an interview or on a resume well I think we've touched on it on a number of ways during this conversation everything that you do translates so just as Kathleen mentioned think about it not just the competitions you do but the volunteerism that you might participate in what did you do what was the outcome what were the challenges what was your role how did you fit in and write it all down think about it when we're talking about it it's a great opportunity for you to relate those very

real management skills to what you can do in your profession in the cyber world so it seems it seems like you can just do it and you know it and you can talk about it but the act of writing it down organizing your thoughts and really looking at analyzing what was your role what did you do what did you take from it that's going to be key to your ability to convey something in an interview and present yourself as someone who can take on a larger role and it's not only in your job search but it is also you know in your current employment I mean we're not all looking for our next job but you may be looking

to stay with your employer but you're looking for a bigger role you're looking for a bigger opportunity you want to have a different career strategy one thing that is not taught in companies is for managers or hiring managers or recruiters how they coach and counsel the people that are working inside the company to stay with the company and move on in different roles they don't want to lose you and you don't want to go out and try to find a new job so using all of these skills all of these tips that we have shared during this presentation take that to your current employer and say I want to build a career strategy within this company and

these are the things that I have been doing in the community that can help this company so some of my final thoughts in community volunteering is is a really great way to stretch your mind and I always look at community volunteering as a way to work on some development challenge our professional development challenges that I don't have any other opportunity to work on my best example and there's only one person in the room who understand this example is I had someone on one of my groups that I was always butting heads with and no matter what phone conversation we were in or face to face conversation and we butt heads like there was nobody's business and we would

always walk out of the room really mad and I realized well I couldn't try that sort of work situation in my personal life with my husband or I would have had a divorce I couldn't really work on that situation in my professional development or in my profession because my staff would leave me so I used this community volunteering board opportunity to sort of examine okay this is a challenge that I have in my life I butt heads with people and I realized time and time again the reason why they were butting heads with me is because I wasn't listening I wasn't giving them the opportunity to say their piece and I needed to just shut up and once I

stopped trying to talk all the time and listen to the people who were on my board I actually was able to lower the stress and tension level within that organization and I always look at community volunteering as personal development in addition to professional development it's a lot cheaper than paying for a lot of therapy so Doug Cindy some final thoughts on community volunteering Cindy go first and then done so one of the things I found when I was working for the DoD and I mean I was able to present to the chief of staff for the Air Force for Air Force personnel that was kind of exciting but I had the ability to present to them based upon a very clear

set of rules which at the time was I think we saw it was a die cap at the time so I was able to say this is what is happening and this is how it's going I can point directly back to a very clear set of rules that they were required to follow volunteering and being able to express myself in different formats has given me the ability to now become a little more articulate when it comes to less I guess prescriptive levels of security now I'm presenting the boards of directors think this is what you need to do and it's a little bit more ambiguous as far as why you need to do it and have that ability to be able to

express that those thoughts that everything in a clearer format because I'm having two on CFP what I'm doing CFPs be able to articulate two different types of group of people volunteer organization when I'm going in and I'm talking to the caterers who have no clue what we're doing to the lighting guys who kind of have an idea of what they're doing but they don't know when we're trying to get across and being able to spread this communication ability across all these different areas that has helped me out tremendously another real quick story when Kathleen and I were preparing to do the first iteration of this panel I went to my leadership and his rapid evidence very involved the

community and I said so you know I'm doing this on community involvement and you know what what do you you know what got rapid7 involved they probably the story about you know Metasploit coming into the community being community involved because of Metasploit and it just evolved from there and I said well you guys know I'm really involved with lots of aspects of the community I said what do you guys have do we have any resources in place that would help if I find myself like over-committing and the feet this is the VP of HR says you know we don't that's a great idea would you like to help lead that guess what so yeah so once again over

committing to yourself over committing your time volunteering for things you never knew we're going to be a part of that's something to be aware of and to try to manage the best year availability and be a little bit particular on what you're going to go ahead and select your efforts your energy but did we put into not my strong suit but I'll try to be concise two things that I wanted to say one if you are an employer or if you are in the process of trying to sell the idea of the volunteerism to your employer using a specific example of various group we had hard data people in the company who were active in

that their professional communities had higher personnel evaluations and this was consistent and by a significant enough margin that it was it was a noteworthy figure we had an elite pentesting team at varus group rose to about almost 30 people we during one calendar year at zero attrition ask any recruiter ask any HR person that will never happen on a team of 30 they were so active in the community so networked with people outside of the company it was clear that there was a connection so if you're trying to sell it as an employer or to an employer this is it's hard data and then about networking we talk about it a lot I don't know if we really delve into it as

deeply as we should it's not just showing up meeting some people talking about things that's awesome get their names get their contact information follow up see if there's anything out there that you can participate in through those new connections and maintain them seems like a daunting task you know a bunch of people it takes a lot of time but it doesn't necessarily take as much as you might think but if you just meet them at an event and then walk away it's not going to do you nearly the good that ongoing contact and to give a personal example that is outside of cyber but I'm fortunate to have done some things with a local recruiting group first panel I ever did

shout out Matt - Matt Duren a tenable it's a recruiting organization and the last two jobs that I've taken both coming in situations where I was in an employment situation that I knew I needed to get out of reached out to people that I had met through recruiting organizations and the jobs came to me and it's a small thing but it's huge the last two jobs I've gotten I've loved and the reason for it is because I didn't just I didn't have to go out and just throw my resume and everything under the Sun I had people out there who knew of opportunities they knew me well enough to know what might be a good opportunity

for me and they helped get me into the right place so I cannot emphasize enough networking is an active commitment but it is it pays off the dividends are miserable so we're out of time we actually ran over does anyone have any questions or if you don't have any questions we'll be around we have another panel so was this an okay presentation [Applause]