Information Technology (IT) has grown up a lot, and security only really became a field recently. Those who have had a variety of experiences, or those who have grown up along with the field of security, have had the advantage of being Jack-Of-All-Trades. Those who know how many of the pieces fit together (even if they can’t do the other roles) have a better understanding of upstream and downstream risks, more ways to look at problems, and a larger selection of solutions to choose from. I want to advocate stepping back from being only specialists, leverage conferences to learn, and network to grow your knowledge of the whole IT sphere.
Nicole Schwartz (@CircuitSwan) has been a Technical Product Manager for the Rackspace for 5 years and ARAMARK for 4 years. She has worked with and developed Agile teams (Scrum and Kanban) for over a decade and more recently has started assisting Scrum Masters and teams as an Agile Coach. She has assisted companies with recommendations to improve their hiring practices. She has a background in Windows systems administration, Active Directory administration, and Microsoft SQL database administration. When she isn’t working she attends conventions (you may have known her as @AmazonV) and is one of the organizers for Skytalks.