A top performer like Tom Brady, who has been to 10 Super Bowls in his 19-year career as quarterback playing football, suddenly wants to play offensive linemen or maybe running back, would you let him? Just remember, he feels pigeonholed as a quarterback and wants a change!
I feel like the above analogy is interesting, because of course we would want him to play quarterback because he’s so good at it. I would expect he wouldn’t want to change positions, because he’s invested his life into being the best at that position. It’s interesting though to hear people concerned with being pigeonholed at their current job. I often hear this concern and when discussed, well, it’s a bad thing. When you do a quick google search for pigeonhole all you find is how to get out of it and why it’s bad. People don’t want to be tasked with one single thing and be good at it. One definition has it as ”that you find yourself performing the exact same tasks day in and day out.” Another article described it as “This doesn’t mean that you’re not good at your job; if anything, it means that you became so good at your job that you haven’t put yourself on a path toward further advancement.”
Now let’s think about this for a second. In the second quote it’s saying you’re too good at your job so much so that you’re not on the path to move forward. I find that interesting because the people concerned about this I would say aren’t worried about being pigeonholed at all, but concerned about doing a job that they don’t enjoy. Could you imagine Tom Brady, Micheal Jordan or Wayne Gretzke saying “I’m getting pigeonholed to throw the football/make baskets/score goals game after game!”? No, of course not. They loved what they did and couldn’t imagine suddenly playing another position or role on the team.
When you’re worried about being pigeonholed and coming up with a game plan with your manager on how to get out of it, maybe some of the questions they should be asking instead are: What do they enjoy? What position do they want? I find that sometimes these answers aren’t related to security at all. They want to be managers, project managers or director/c-level. To go back to my analogy, these people want to be the head coaches, general manager or even an owner of a sports team, but don’t actually want to play the sport. Does this seem weird? To go back to the football analogy, the only reason Tom Brady is winning SuperBowls is in hopes that one day can be a head coach? Of course, this seems very weird. If you want to be a head coach, train to be a head coach. Sure, having the experience as a player can be helpful but not required. If you want to own a sports team, that doesn’t mean you have to play on one for a period of time. To go back to the security field: If you want to be a project manager, go be a project manager. Study for it, take classes and get stronger in the field. It will help having security knowledge for this position, but you’re not going to suddenly go from a great security engineer to great manager because of the time you spent in the security field, but sadly this is often seen.
If you do make that jump for another position, how do you think it’s going to turn out? Now I want to note Micheal Jordan did just that by retiring and playing baseball for a year. He didn’t start on the top just because he was amazing at basketball; no, he had to start from the bottom and work his way up again. This never took off as another career, but he gave up everything for this new goal. Micheal Jordan put his heart and soul into baseball and he still couldn’t reach the very top while having all the luxuries of being a basketball super star.
I personally want to be pigeon holed as an analyst, it’s what I love to do. I strive to be the best I can at that position. I want to be the person that others can count on for that critical decision. With making this choice I do become envious of other analysts that go off and become engineers, architects or even CISO, but not because I want these positions, but because these people’s words suddenly have weight in the decisions that are being made in a company. Their words have weight to others for no other reason than a title change. I don’t feel like analysts are valued as high as these other positions. Even though analysts are on the front lines protecting the company from attackers and have key insight on the threat landscape, their input on topics is sometimes the least. So why would they want to stay in a position where their voice isn’t heard?
If you start to worry about being pigeonholed, step back and think about what you enjoy for a position. It’s taken me being an engineer two times to realize it’s not for me. Sometimes you’ll have to jump multiple positions to find what you enjoy. My advice though is if you truly enjoy what you do, even if it’s not regarded as important, continue to do it. You’ll be happier than taking a position you don’t like but has a perceived higher “value”. And CISO, managers, architects and engineers, listen to your SOC analysts. They might have key insight in helping identify security gaps in the company, plus they might stick around longer.
Editor: Emily Domedion