I went to pick up a friend for lunch a while back, and while I was waiting, I struck up a conversation with one of his coworkers. The young man asked me about my job, and when I told him I worked for a cybersecurity company, he got excited!

“That’s what I’m studying in school,” he said. “Would you mind telling me how you broke into the cyber job market? It would really help me out.”

Here’s what I told him, tongue-in-cheek the entire time:

Step 1: Decide you want to be a physical therapist and spend the first couple of years of college studying biology, human anatomy, chemistry, and exercise science while working in the university’s gym.

Step 2: Realize how much you hate chemistry and biology, then switch your major to jazz studies because you’ve been a musician all your life and want to make a go of it as a drummer.

Step 3: Spend the next 3 years questioning every decision you ever made about becoming a musician and changing your major between history and music every semester until your wife-to-be says, “Why don’t you just double major?!”

Step 4: Graduate with a double major in history and music, then take a job working as an ophthalmic technician for two eye doctors because it’s the first job someone offered you that didn’t pay minimum wage.

Step 5: Become a banker after your wife graduates college because you have to move, and your boss’s daughter just happens to be hiring, and you’ve got a recommendation.

Step 6: Demote yourself to teller (seriously, I willingly took a demotion) because you hate putting people in debt and cold-calling people over dinner to sell them credit cards.

Step 7: Get recruited by Apple on the recommendation of a friend, and learn how awesome you are at teaching. Then spend the next two and a half years honing that craft.

Step 8: Go to work for a child support agency to develop your writing and marketing skills… Because yeah, that tracks.

Step 9: Watch the world go to hell during a global pandemic, lose your job, flounder in unemployment for 8 months, and nearly die from COVID at 30 years old.

Step 10: Find a way to combine your teaching and marketing skills by becoming a content developer for an online business education company

Step 11: Get laid off from that company for no reason at all, only to have a conversation with a former coworker from said company who gets you an interview with your future boss at the cybersecurity company.

There you have it: in just 11 easy steps, you, too, can get a great job in cybersecurity!

He got the joke, and he knew I was trying to be helpful even though I really had no idea how it happened.

But I ended my advice with an offer: if he wanted a job at my company, or any other company where I knew someone, I would give him a recommendation and make an introduction.

Because that’s how I got every single job I’ve ever had. I knew someone (or someone knew me and my work); that led to a conversation where we genuinely connected. That connection often led to a job offer.

I’ve (most likely) applied to more than 1,000 jobs since I started working at age 16. And the only way I ever got an interview was because someone treated me like a human being, had a conversation with me, and made a connection I needed to get my foot in the door.

---

Speaking of helping other people get their foot in the door, two of the best people I’ve ever worked with (Joe Charman and Rebeca Leininger) are looking for their next roles.

If you need hardworking, technically savvy, AI-fluent, customer-focused, cybersecurity and threat intelligence experts, you’d be extraordinarily LUCKY to have them on your team.

Reach out and connect with them on LinkedIn.