There tends to be an image people usually have in their heads of “cybersecurity professionals.” Even with people who work in the field, the image tends to persist.
Someone at a keyboard. Someone watching alerts. Someone responding to an incident. Someone testing a system. Someone staring at a dashboard trying to figure out whether that blinking red light matters.
That image is real. It matters. It fits a lot of people, including me not too terribly long ago. But it is not the whole community.
The phrase "cybersecurity professional" should be bigger than that. It should include the people who explain risk to executives, build training programs, write documentation, manage customer relationships, run communities, conduct research, design products, help organizations evaluate products, support implementations, assess third parties, build partner ecosystems, teach newcomers, translate technical findings into business decisions, and help organizations make better security choices.
Those people are doing cybersecurity work too.
Related:
Bill Brenner
To be clear, I am not trying to water down the field. Technical depth matters. Hands-on experience matters. Operational credibility matters. But the mission of cybersecurity has never lived only at the keyboard. It lives in the handoffs between people. It lives in trust. It lives in how clearly we communicate, how honestly we sell ideas, how well we teach, how carefully we implement, and how consistently we help others make better decisions.
That is part of what we are researching at CYBR.SEC.Community.
We are looking at the cybersecurity community as a real ecosystem, not merely a list of job titles. And even while being conservative, we are already seeing at least 40 distinct role types across a dozen-plus role categories, touching at least five broad parts of the ecosystem.
That’s not a finished taxonomy. It is too early for that. But it is enough to show that the on-ramp into cybersecurity is wider than many people think. And for those who are thinking about a career in the field, that should be encouraging.
Can you write clearly? Can you explain technical ideas without making people feel dumb? Can you build trust with customers, partners, students, executives, or peers? Can you ask good questions and listen long enough to understand the real problem?
There’s probably a place for you here.
Cybersecurity is more than dashboards, more than keyboards, and more than job titles. It is a community of people reducing digital risk from a lot of different angles. And if we are going to bring more good people into the field, we need to start viewing that community with a broader lens.
C.Y.B.R = Community Yields Better Resilience
