CWF Podcast Episode #2 with Lisset Diaz: USING UNCERTAINTY TO FUEL CHANGE
Change of any kind can be a scary thing. Deciding to make a change requires courage to face uncertainty from so many sides.
Our guest for this podcast episode is no stranger to change. She grew up in Peru, and moved to Barcelona to study Telecommunications Engineering. She moved even further away from home when she accepted an opportunity to work in the Netherlands for a financial-sector organisation. In this episode, she tells us about her current challenge, what kind of advice she would give anyone contemplating a career pivot to cybersecurity, and how the skills she honed in her previous job has helped her add value to her security team.
Lisset Diaz currently works as an End-Point Security Engineer in The Hague, Netherlands. She started her career as a Customer Engineer - assisting her company’s clients with their technology products. She talks about how both her curiosity and her love for technology started on her journey - and has sustained her passion - for cybersecurity.
Her challenge at the moment is learning to be a generalist in her field - to support an agile culture that adapts to a volatile environment, and to be able to support each member of her team, while having an undistracted focus on delivering the job. She stresses the importance of acknowledging achievements as a “team effort” and how her listening skills - honed on the job as a customer engineer - has helped her understand the needs of her company’s security team. This has helped her bring back a tool they needed by collaborating with the vendor representatives and configuring it to meet her team’s needs.
Processes and people - she finds them as fascinating as the technology that supports them in an organisation.
Lisset highlights the importance of small meetings and conversations at the work place over a cup of coffee (unfortunately not possible at the moment due to the current health crisis), and getting to know colleagues outside her team. Nurturing a network of colleagues and professionals is very important to her - being part of a virtuous circle of people sharing knowledge and experience with each other.
In the wake of the pandemic - she sees the general focus of security change: from maintaining a fortress to opening up to the cloud and making it possible for staff to continue to do their job while staying safe. Her advice to anyone looking to change their career path is to embrace uncertainty, to use it as a fuel to look for opportunities to grow and develop yourself - understand your strengths, what gives you joy and to explore where you could fit in.