How Curiosity and Problem-solving Skills Can Advance Your Cybersecurity Career

Wondering about job opportunities in the rapidly growing, increasingly critical field of cybersecurity? Pondering how your current IT skill set would fit into a cybersecurity position? Then, you may already have two qualities that can help you launch a successful cybersecurity career.

Professional skills, such as curiosity and problem solving, can provide a strong basis for finding and landing cybersecurity positions, according to Theo Hysell, a senior cybersecurity analyst at TCF Bank, one of the nation’s largest regional banks.

“Probably one of my biggest strengths in this field is I get bored fast,” said Hysell, referring to the inquisitive nature that drives him to learn continually on the job. “Being bored means I’m constantly looking for new problems to solve.”

That’s not a problem in a cybersecurity career. Hysell says you’re constantly learning about the bad guys and constantly evolving adding to your knowledge of people, processes and technology tools.

Leveraging Your Natural Curiosity

This natural curiosity and passion for solving problems is a good fit for Hysell’s current role in TCF’s security operations center (SOC), where he monitors alerts, analyzes patterns and looks for opportunities to refine and automate the detection processes. His job is helping TCF’s cybersecurity team assess risk levels quickly and respond faster to threats.

Hysell believes most online behavior is not consciously reckless, just uninformed. And his job is thinking of ways to keep users out of trouble.

“I’m interested in catching bad actors doing bad things,” Hysell said. “I’m not here to police people. I’m here to make the organization safer.”

Hysell’s IT career started nearly 10 years ago after graduating from Creating IT Future’s (now the CompTIA Tech Career Academy’s) inaugural IT-Ready class in the Twin Cities. His first position on an IT help desk exposed him to cybersecurity duties and he was immediately drawn to the field.

This eagerness accelerated Hysell’s cybersecurity career, as a series of acquisitions and mergers between companies where he was working presented him with opportunities to join new organizations and take on new responsibilities. Over the years, Hysell has advanced through six cybersecurity positions at several different firms, sharpening his expertise in incident response, threat intelligence and related specialties.

“Right now, I’m trying my hand at automation and orchestration,” Hysell said. He is interested in honing his acumen for penetration testing and “red teaming,” a method of exposing systems vulnerabilities by simulating cyber attacks.

Cultivating Your Cybersecurity Career with Certified Technical and Professional Skills

Hysell cites earning his first round of CompTIA certifications as the foundation of his cybersecurity career because the process, in his opinion, focuses learning better than a generalized computer science degree. Hysell says in his experience with college programs, students may spend as many as two years learning stuff that they never will use on the job. By contrast, certifications are pockets of information that one chooses to learn rather than is required to learn.

After earning CompTIA A+ certification through IT-Ready, Hysell quickly added CompTIA Network+ and  CompTIA Security+ to his tech credentials. Obtaining these credentials taught him how to learn technical proficiency. In the years since his early CompTIA training, he has accumulated an array of progressively more sophisticated certifications in cybersecurity technologies. This cycle of continual learning and specialization appeals to Hysell as he believes IT pros must strive to keep being good at what you do.

“One thing cybersecurity professionals cannot afford to be is stagnant,” he Hysell said. “Every time you take a new job, everything changes – a whole new set of people, processes and tools.”

For this reason, Hysell feels acquiring business professional skills was the most valuable aspect of his IT-Ready training.

“You develop relationships, you talk to people, you ask a lot of questions,” he said, sharing that several former supervisors had recruited him for new jobs after they had joined other organizations. He describes cybersecurity as a surprisingly small space where building a reputation for diversifying your IT skills can generate promotions and salary growth.

Doing Meaningful Work That Benefits Your Community

Hysell feels cybersecurity is a career that allows him to do something meaningful.

“I feel proud of my work,” he said. “I don’t have any grand visions of saving the planet, but I used to work in the energy sector for a couple years. That felt very important to play a role in supporting civilization. And now I’m in banking, where I help make sure people’s money stays safe.”

Working for a regional bank, Hysell said, creates a kind of commitment to your neighbors. And this sense of community runs through his relationships with colleagues, as well.

“I feel I’m fostering lifelong relationships,” he said, mentioning that many of his colleagues attended his wedding last year. “This career has been way more fulfilling than I imagined. I’ve been on a path of constant learning, and mentally I’m always in a good space.”

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