As the division I work in is going through its own branding exercise as it prepares to be spun off from the rest of the company. I thought it was a good idea to work on my personal branding. Last October I wrote about the book Start With Why. As I mentioned at the time my initial reasons for reading it was to come up with my personal brand. That morphed into writing out what my “why” was. I given it a little bit of thought on and off since then. I was frustrated that I couldn’t come up with something that truly explained me. So I parked the objective while I gave it further thought.
If you’ve read this blog you can tell that this year’s been very transformative for me. I moved across the world. My dad passed. You know lots of life stuff happened. Along the way it dawned on me that I want to focus more of my career on information security. It has always been a big part of my work however never a direct focus. For the past few years I have been focusing on growing SRE teams and cloud technology. Information security and cloud technology go hand-in-hand. I found myself wanting to be more directly involved in the security aspects of work than anything else. It’s what I find myself most interested in outside of work. So why not be my focus for my career.
I think that was the bit of information that I needed to click in my head to come up with my wife statement. Surprisingly after I had that clarity of focus on why I was motivated writing out the “what” and “how” of what I do came very easily. I have asked a few friends in the industry for feedback. I liked the idea of my own personal board of directors after reading a few articles on the topic. With some trusted friends advise I only had some minor tweaks. I felt like it was time to post to LinkedIn. Then I felt like writing about it here.
This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m shopping around for new job. I’ve worked enough in incident preparedness to know that you need to be ready for the unexpected. That means having my public profile to date. It is also always a good idea to keep my options open. Sometimes the best things come out of the blue. That is how I ended up at my interview at my current job in the first place!
Without further ado my personal why statement (aka personal brand) is:
I want people to feel safe using technology. People are not able to truly feel secure using technology if they fear they are being watched.
I manage teams that build, maintain and support secure fault tolerant applications and infrastructure be it on premises or in the public cloud. I do this by hiring engineers who believe DevSecOps is more than a buzz word. I grow high performance teams that believe those who do the work should have a say in how the work is done.
I build world class tools and procedures to empower operations teams to provide high level of availability to whatever they build and maintain.
What can I build for you?
