 I'll tell you one thing before we start, I'll just give you guys a little bit of background on some of the thought process that went into preparing this type of talk and this type of really a training session. Mike and I have worked a long time with a lot of folks. This is our third year together at DEF CON. We've really talked to a lot of people that are trying to figure out where they need to go in their careers. The one thing that we continue to come back to is that everybody has different things that motivate them and different things that drive them. With that in mind, we put together this training class that was really going to be interactive. Hopefully the class itself, I know three hours is a long time and there are some breaks incorporated into this, but to really get the true value out of this class for yourself, you're going to have to really commit to being here for the full time. This exercise, this is something that I believe that you're going to be able to take home with you, you can apply it to your current career and hopefully you'll be able to walk out of here better at managing your career, better at figuring that there's some direction to where you want to go and there's some reasoning behind it and that you're not going to just arrive where you want to be because of dumb luck or because you're at the right place at the right time. We're hoping that through this presentation you get a feeling of doing the things necessary so that you aren't lucky, that it's not about luck, it's because you've actually taken a proactive approach to managing your career. Yeah, and I think Lee, just to underscore what Lee said, this is not a talk, this is hands-on, we'll be passing out exercise books, when it's time to do the first exercise we'll pass out, I believe it's 15 pages of exercises, we are going to push you guys to work on yourself. Career planning is not a spectator sport, you can't sit in the audience here and just listen to what we have to say and figure out all the right answers for yourselves, it doesn't work like that. Unfortunately you're not going to get any sort of continuing education credit for this. Yeah, there's no certification at the end but at the same time the reward is effectively having a better career and liking what you do and all that sort of stuff. Before we get to exercises I want to set some context, Lee and I came to DEF CON last year and released a survey that we'll talk about in this first section that helps put all of the other things that we're going to do today in context. This industry is a relatively interesting industry from the perspective of career development. If you talk to normal career coaches and go to Barnes & Noble and buy your average career book a lot of the advice doesn't work very well in this industry. This is an industry that's incredibly fast moving, it's also a very young industry that has gone through a lot of changes over the last 20 years. As I look at the industry there are really three areas of information security from the perspective of careers. There's that first time that was sort of pre-1994, pre-internet and when I say pre-internet I more mean there was no Amazon.com, there was obviously the internet as infrastructure and structure for researchers and academics but it wasn't a public internet in that we weren't doing e-commerce, we weren't all sending e-mail, we weren't all on Twitter. At that time being in information security was really the realm of you were either an academic or you were part of military government in some way or you were just weird. You were just a hacker who liked to do it for fun and this is the era out of which all of the things that we have today like DEF CON and RSA and SANS came from they started out as gathering places for these weird corner case people whether it was academics or researchers or whatever. In that time there wasn't really a career track in information security, there wasn't really any certification even when SANS started it was mostly conferences more than it was certification. The idea was you just sort of did it because you liked it and if you got paid for it hey that was kind of cool too and then the internet sort of came along and security became interesting especially as things started to get broken into more and more. As soon as the web started to exist, website defacement started to exist and hackers were breaking into all this new interesting infrastructure and interesting online stuff because they could get attention and conversely because companies were putting money into these things it became part of the company's business model to have a website to have an internet presence and so they had to protect it. At that point the people who were getting hired were the same people who five years ago were doing it just for fun. It was the era of the ex hacker and I mean I remember when I first came into the industry back in that time you couldn't go two weeks without reading an article entitled should I hire a former hacker or is it cool to hire ex hackers? I mean there was an article like that in every magazine, every IT website every two weeks because that was the only real option. If you didn't hire an ex hacker you hired somebody who didn't know anything because there was no formal training, there was no formal certification, there was no background in it and that was actually the time at which those things started to come up because it really was the wild west. We started to see certifications be created. We started to see trainings happen. We also started to see more corporate events you know because there's all this money being funneled into it because there's so much you know it's all the dot coms and that sort of stuff things like black hat come around. Defcon costs a hundred bucks, black hat costs fifteen hundred because corporations can pay that and they're used to paying that for other types of training conferences for all their people and they're okay with that. So that you know that gets us to like the end of the dot com bubble and sort of 9-11. Yeah well I mean and even getting into that timetable between 1994 and 2001 you know what's happening is that you know you're seeing a lot of money being created because of the internet and because of the dot com boom and the NASDAQ and everything like that. So the other thing that happens between 1994 and 2001 more toward the later stages is that venture capital money starts flowing into the information security industry. I mean you see companies that are created like Accent and ISS and RSA and then you start seeing that wave of consultancies, the at stakes, the found stones, the gardens, the federases. So people start in the security space say wow I'm going to go get rich like all the software developers in Silicon Valley and then what happens is this is that opportunity really starts sprouting up because it didn't matter if you're a nineteen year old kid or a forty year old ex-fed your skills became in high demand because there was a scarcity of who you are. So what happened was that there was more opportunity than there were people who were capable of actually handling those jobs and I mean I remember I started recruiting in 1996 and I'll never forget making some of my first calls telling people I was a recruiter that specialized in information security and people said what do you mean? You mean the guys, the guards and the dogs and everything like that and I said no you know information security you know hackers. So you know there was a different level of awareness so I mean it was almost kind of like you know there weren't many people who set out to become information security professionals it was something where you kind of gravitated towards it because that's who you were that's what kind of made you tick that's kind of what drove you. And then you get to 2001 you know the NASDAQ plummets then 9-11 happens. So the NASDAQ plummets has a real negative effect on our industry because all these great venture capital all the money dries up very quickly. But then unfortunately or fortunately for our industry 9-11 happens and security becomes coffee table talk cocktail hours everybody becomes that much more aware about information security because security is in the news we're all fearful at that time. So what happens is this is that security starts gaining a lot of momentum in my recruiting business 2001 and 2002 were quite busy years and the reason it was busy because companies started to realize whoa we really need to protect ourselves so corporate America really starts getting into the game about building their own internal information security functions and relies a lot less on the services firms and the product vendors they start fortifying themselves and then you start seeing a lot more you start seeing the government put out the oh goodness that the certain all the universities that offered the you know the NSA the NSA you know sort of you know they start this becomes a real effort to start getting people educated in the field of information security and you start seeing people thinking wow this is a hot career of the future. And then what happens is the certification body say you know what we could market the heck out of this stuff. We could really go out there we have an audience people are going to pay money for security skills they start releasing surveys if you have security you're going to earn 20% more if you don't have security. So people say wow you know what I'm going to pay $2,000 and go to a sans class that I'm going to get an extra $10,000 for doing my job that makes a lot of sense where am I going to get those kind of returns. So people start looking at it you know wow a CISSP okay great I have to get a CISP I remember most of my clients back in that timetable would either a pay fully for somebody CISSP or give somebody a bonus once they pass their CISSP because they were including it all in their marketing literature to their customers to their business partners and to their employees as a recruiting tool. We have the most CISPs how many companies said that in like 2000 and 2001. Yeah actually when I was at Encircle in 2003 it was actually in our marketing literature that every one of the engineers on the security relevant parts of the company had CISPs. You don't see that in marketing literature anymore you don't go to some company's website and see them say oh all of our people are CISSP certified or CEH certified but at the time it was huge. So I mean so we actually you know from about 1996 to about 2000 I guess about now really lived in a bubble we lived in this golden era where we were special and we were unique and we were untouchable the economy couldn't affect us and then the economy happened right and then we got slapped in the face and so I want to I want to just jump in I mentioned the survey a few minutes ago but we we're not doing this just this is not anecdotal for us you know we we decided to do a survey at DEF start the survey at DEF CON last year and in in sort of the last half of last year because we were tired of not seeing any real data you know we wanted we got up here and talked about this the last few years and it was all based on my experience these experience stories our friends told us stories our co-workers told us and we were tired of not having any real numbers so we got almost a thousand people to respond to the survey and I mean that that's pretty impressive because it was a very long survey it was actually I mean quick show of hands are there any people in the room that actually did the survey pretty long survey right I mean what 15 20 minutes and that's we had we had Dr. Max Kilger helping us design it and he basically said we we sort of hit the limit you know that was as long as you could reasonably ask people to to devote to us without giving them a car yeah without giving them like something major to do it you know and obviously we're doing this because we like doing it and we want to help and so you know we weren't paying people to do it and and for the people who just put their hands up thank you because we really do appreciate it and and we really want to use that to give back to you guys and I mean to interrupt Mike just for a second you know I mean we didn't have you know there was no budget for the survey I mean we tweeted about it we posted up on our blog we try to call as many dark reading posted it we talked to the folks over the ISSA the people at ISC square told it and sans told us that they wouldn't be a part of our survey and I'm like okay you guys are ISC squared and sans but you know so I mean what we try to do is that we try to go on oh wasp was very helpful and especially the New York chapter so I mean we try to actually with our own personal means and like our own personal favors we try to call in as many as we possibly could to get it out to all different groups within the you know within the ecosystem you know so it was one where you know anybody could the only thing that we asked people were that you had a career in information security and that this was kind of the direction that you wanted ahead so you know we didn't we didn't sponsor it we didn't pay for anything any publication everything was basically goodwill and you know at the good graces of others yes so this is all community based and we're we you know we're taking this moment out to really thank everybody because it really did matter and it's funny because the the survey coincided with the economy falling apart and obviously we didn't have a crystal ball we didn't see that coming but the data showed something really interesting and Lee was just talking about you know from 2001 to really you know last year we were special and we're not anymore and all of this is going to be very data driven and we're going to talk about you know what's really happening out there but guess what we're not special anymore so I mean just to go right here to give you some overview right I mean I I'm amazed I run a recruiting business right and what I've been amazed with about is how many talented information security professionals are looking for work right now and I'm not talking about you know whether it's entry level folks chief information security officers or anything in between and one of the problems that's happened here is that you know the trickle down effect of the economy is threefold because corporations aren't spending they're not relying on their service providers as much they're also letting people go they're also buying less product so two of the major factors facets of the information security space a lot of the real core where a lot of the core talent lies to a lot of that has been affected because professional services which has always been a safe haven for a lot of information security pros especially ones that live in remote places because they could travel and product companies these product companies they're no longer you know they're either behemoth or they're very small right I mean who would think that today that ISS wouldn't be a company or that RSA wouldn't be a company anymore I mean and semantic owns you know McPhea semantic owns you know bought storage company I mean it's it's pretty crazy it's pretty crazy that security in the general software arena is not a standalone purchase anymore and the smaller companies are having a very hard time breaking through to gain significant market share and to get to what could be an equity event which has caused a lot of the venture capitalists to pull out their money and go out into different types of investments and invest in non information security type companies so what you've had is basically like a triple whammy it's a trickle down effect corporations don't buy consultants no need layoff people don't buy product no venture capital so we just got caught in this tremendous vortex and then you know the fact is is this is that we've done such a great job of marketing this certification the marketing this profession by making information security a hot desirable in-demand profession I mean we all kind of believe that right but the fact is is that there's so many more of you right there's so much more competition out there and there's so many less there are a lot fewer good jobs so people used to say wow there's a shortage of people even now people say you know we have more information security work than we know don't don't know what to do with I heard Alan pallor at the Gardner group tell me that the government was hiring 2000 information security people and that they needed to do so immediately what people fail to see is that even though they're hiring all those people those might not be the jobs that people want so the truth of the matter is that what I believe personally I believe that it's not that there's not enough good people I personally believe they're not enough great jobs anymore there's not as much opportunity as we used to have our profession is maturing and the career path is starting to gain a lot more definition so as things become structured it's important for us as professionals to start being able to actually work within these structures and to be able to kind of like other industries do you're going to see in the future they're going to be more defined steps to climbing the ladder to earning more money to getting more responsibility they must like that over there yeah apparently that was good but it's really important so as you get more definition you're going to have to start working within that structure and you're going to believe it or not unfortunately you're going to have to conform to it somewhat yeah and the data really shows that now I just want to digress for a second before we jump into some real analysis when when you look at who responded to the survey the demographics are kind of interesting and I think if you look around def con it's pretty obvious this is a very male driven industry it's also an industry that has a very high degree of education and surprisingly a lot of the people who responded have been in the industry a while you know we we had some more than half of the people had at least five years so if you had done that same thing five years ago if you had asked how many people had five years of experience five years ago that would have been a very small number and that's what we're talking about as far as the industry maturing is that you know having a lot of tenured people is going to cause more more conformity in the in the industry of the people you know it breaks down the majority of people are actually providing security for the for their you know for who they work for some smaller minority was a were consultants in a very small amount of the people worked for a product vendor were a very well paid industry as a whole you know i'm sure everyone probably feels like they could earn more money but as a whole you know if you think of the fact that the median income for a family of four in the united states is just over forty thousand dollars a year that more than forty five percent of the people in our industry make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year two and a half times the median income for the country we are quite well compensated as a whole as far as job roles of the people who responded that's how they broke down you know and it's sort of what you'd expect the majority of people are at the bottom of the pyramid and going up from there i mean this is very i mean it's very interesting that you know when you look at the data that thirty percent who answered their survey were manager level or above and sixty four percent were either engineers or technical leads of some sort so having that one to two ratio i thought was pretty interesting the other six percent were entrepreneurs so they were kind of you know CEO of everything or CEO of nothing like i'm the president of the company but i take out the trash so i don't know but i mean it's it was just very telling that we actually got what i feel is a very good breakdown you know of having like a almost like a two to one ratio of technical folks to management folks which i think is fairly indicative of our market as a whole from the perspective of skills i put it on screen it's kind of hard to read but we'll put the we'll be releasing these results better later the skills that most people with this question was structured as give us your number one and number two top skills that you have basically if i gave you only two choices what's what's the thing you're best at what's the thing you're number two at the law the orange bars are number are people who said number one the blue bars are people who said number two and so network security is pretty much at the top of the list i was i was a little shocked the compliance and governance was second you know especially given the the emphasis on technology that we all play that so many people said that compliance was their number one you know their top skill or their number two skill suggests again i i really believe in one of the reasons we've done this survey is we like to see we want to see the changes in the industry we'll do this again in you know 18 months or 36 months if i had done this same survey five years ago we wouldn't have seen compliance anywhere near the top of this list you know we wouldn't have seen strategy as anywhere near the top of this list we we would have seen you know vulnerability management and pen testing and security research we would have seen the technical skills far higher five years ago than we see today i think that what this you know what this chart really shows is kind of the i guess the breadth of the people that actually responded to the survey because in my in my company as we look at corporations information security functions i mean this is almost very standard i mean i would think that you know yeah you know if you start looking at these skills um and you start looking at how it's laid out i would almost say that you know most corporations you know these are the things that they rely on in kind of the weighting that they rely on them whether it's you know corporate governance and secure you know and network security and architecture and pen testing i mean all like the first five or six or seven skills were actually i i thought fairly well represented by the skill set that i traditionally work with on a regular basis and it was interesting to see this this this part now this we released some of this last week with kelly at dark reading this came out last week and um i could rant on this for about an hour this blows my mind that we you know one of the things we really wanted to understand was about job satisfaction you know how happy are we and i expected security to be a community of people who were very satisfied with what they were doing on a daily basis because most of us you know security has this wonderful because it's such a new industry it has this wonderful characteristic not one of us probably in this entire conference or perhaps even in this entire industry was pushed into this by their parents you know you how many of your parents said i want you to grow up to be a hacker right but so so you don't we all chose to be here we all picked this one for ourselves and one in two of us are not happy does that blow your mind like i i actually figured we that the satisfaction chart would be like you know 80 percent of people were satisfied or better i really did i and maybe i'm naive i i didn't think that actually this doesn't this this data shocks me a lot less than it shocks mike i mean because in our office on a daily basis we're not really dealing with happy customers right we're dealing with we're dealing with people who are you know either you know had had a you know had a hard time in their past company are underpaid and underappreciated and overworked you know we deal with like the complaint department right i mean so this didn't really completely surprise me i mean and to give you guys a way that we phrase the question and this is where dr killger was very helpful it was basically you know in your job in your current job you know are you you know extremely satisfied more than is it was extremely satisfied more than yeah extremely satisfied more than satisfied satisfied uh less than less than satisfied and significantly less than satisfied or somewhat look something like that overall how i'm reading overall how satisfied are you with your current position so i'll even give you guys even a little bit more into the data so fifth sixteen percent said they were not satisfied at all and the number one answer was with 36 percent was some was oh was was somewhat satisfied then what's it called 15 percent was very satisfied and six percent was extremely satisfied so i mean the fact that people generally were less than satisfied or somewhere kind of underneath that you know that threshold i wasn't surprised about that but 50 percent is a big number and i think that kelly caused quite a stir when she posted that out there because that's a you know that's a pretty bold statement i mean you know we didn't have 50 000 respondents to the survey so i don't know if that's necessarily 100 indicative of the industry as a whole but i mean these are people who go to conferences these are people who you know these are where this is where we publicize the survey of places where people were you know dedicated to their careers so for them to be less than satisfied i would think that most people who come to a conference or come to you know or read security blogs or on you know the security kind of tweet security tweets and stuff like that i would believe that those folks are probably more than thrilled about what they're doing and yeah less i mean go ahead yeah that's coming yeah that's coming that'll come in the report yeah that's coming we actually and i haven't analyzed that piece of the data yet but we have some slides that'll probably blow your mind we've we've cut the data up i mean a little i love survey monkey survey you know just a little plug for survey monkey because it rocks we've cut the data up in some really interesting ways and we're gonna give you a few of those today but we're really we've we've seen some really interesting trends on things like that so and that actually provides a nice segue just all right since since we're here to talk about career planning today show of hands how many people have a written career plan i gotta chuckle yeah i gotta tell you guys somebody laughed and that's surprising the actual survey data about 16 percent of people have a written career plan in this industry of the 936 that will all change when you leave here today that will all change when you guys leave because that number is gonna get gonna get messed up a little bit what's interesting about that is that even with that lack of career planning everybody thinks their life's gonna be good you know two-thirds of people are more than confident that they're gonna reach their ultimate career goal with no plan with no plan um more than half think that they know what the next step should be more than half are are confident their resumes good to go and just about half think that their resume totally differentiates them from their peers now i look at a lot of resumes i could tell you that that's bullshit so now people think that they're living right but they really aren't yeah yeah i mean this this data just blows my mind because when we cut the data of the survey up by career plan it blows your mind that's 16 percent are 20 percent more likely to have 20 to have five years experience almost 50 percent more likely to be director level or above and be making more than 120k and almost 30 percent more satisfied on the whole than the people who don't awesome and so i mean the reason we decided to do career planning as this topic and that you know as this talk is right there the the few of you that put up your hands have a big advantage over everybody else in this room that doesn't have a written career plan according to the numbers i and there's sort of a chicken and egg question are they successful and happy and well paid because they have a career plan or did they write a career plan because the type of person who's successful happy and well paid don't know that's not in the data but this says to me that i damn well better have a written career plan you know even if it just turns out to it just what i guess what it says is it's a worthwhile exercise yeah you know it's something that everybody in other words this is something that has nothing to do with external factors you know there's nobody you can blame for not having this there's nobody they say well it's not my fault i mean everybody can have a career plan that suits them and i think that's really the key is that your career plan has to suit you and you know what's what's what's good for you know if you look around you know what's good for the guy to your left it's not you know might not be good for the person to the right but everybody has some things that drive them uniquely and that is why you know that that is really bit no that is really the driver for the exercises that we're going to go through and the the journey that we're going to take you on today and you know i i would hope that it'll be worthwhile and i hope that you know you'll be able to kind of just take what you learn here give you some sort of a roadmap and a framework and apply it when you get back home when you have some more time to think about it write some things down and figure it out in the an environment that's a lot less rushed than three hours yeah we're obviously you know having a fully thought-out written career plan is not going to happen this afternoon but you'll have enough of a start that you can actually make it happen four steps to career planning and it's truthfully it's four steps planning anything but as far as a career plan the first thing you need to do is you need to know where you are um you know you need to have a baseline what are my skills today who am i today what do i like to do what do i want to do where do i want to go with my life where do i want to go with my life is step two you know we lee and i talk a lot we use we use the mountain climbing metaphor a lot because we like it um if you're going to climb a mountain the goal is to get to the top what does the top of the mountain look like for you then you just figure out what the path from where you are to the top of that mountain looks like and you set guideposts along the way so you know that you're on the path you know it's it's sort of a google maps type of strategy right pick the pick the beginning know the know the beginning pick the end and then get all of the intermediate turns in the middle it seems real logical right i mean this is simplistic it's not rocket science but you know what though as simplistic as it sounds it's extremely difficult and very few people do it well and i don't think that they don't do it well because they don't know how to do it i think that they don't do they don't do it well because they don't have some guidelines and they don't actually take that effort and that energy to kind of push themselves in the direction to really make them think about what will ultimately make me happy what will ultimately get me satisfied with the job that i do and you know is the end game is is my end game a place that i really want to end up i mean how bad would it be to wind up you know you get that big glass office in the sky and it winds up being a job that you hate i mean that's foolish it's the ultimate tragedy so let's start step one where are you and i love jack welch jack welch was this former ceo of g i think time named him business person of the last century welch had some really interesting things in the way he managed his company but one of the things that is almost always talked about when you talk to when you talk about jack welch is the reality principle and he had this overbearing like overwhelming need to know all the truth of where we are right now even if it was ugly and i think a lot of people don't want to do that nobody wants to look in the mirror and go wow i'm really you know i weigh 280 pounds right you know that sucks nobody wants to look in the mirror and go i have a shitty job and i'm miserable and my life sucks but guess what if you don't know that if you're not willing to face that you can't do anything about it you have to you have to face it as it is and a lot of people don't want to admit that they're not as talented as their coworkers or that maybe they shouldn't have been the one who got the promotion maybe the boss made a good decision maybe i should have been more patient before i moved on maybe i should have worked harder but people don't get that they traditionally get it when it's too late people love to lock the barn doors after the horses have been stolen you know so i think that it's one of those things where you know during this time we're going to really ask you to do some self-reflection we're going to ask you to really think about you know truly and be honest with yourself what am i good at what am i not so good at you know we all like to talk about what we're good at we all like to face the good side of reality but really looking at all the parts of the of what is real really looking at all the parts of yourself and your career and your job and your life and what is real right now grounds you when making decisions you know we'll talk later about career goals and stuff you know a lot there were there were quite a few people who said that they wanted to be an executive not everybody has the talent or the skills or the inclination to be good at being an executive i know lots of really great engineers who have no management future at all that think that that's where they're going and have i mean just don't have you know some of us are talented some things some of us are talented at others knowing what you're really good at and facing that reality is really going to ground you in making all the decisions about your future so all right um just lost the slide control here yay powerpoint um i'm a i think dr phil is hilarious so i had to throw a dr phil quote in i do my best to quote dr phil whenever because he's ridiculous but in this case he has a good point it's time to get real so the first exercise is actually entitled getting real and it it's basically going to walk you through analyzing some of these things about yourself um jan and andrea are going to be passing out the workbooks and and melina um are going to be passing out the workbooks take them i believe we have enough if we don't you might have to share i'm sure some of you would prefer to work on your laptop than work on pieces of paper so feel free um working whatever way is most appropriate we're going to give you about um we're going to give you about 15 minutes for this one um because i want to incorporate a bathroom break because y'all have been sitting there for 40 minutes so we'll come back about one actually let's call it 10 minutes we'll come back about 150 if you have questions come up and ask or you know stick your hand up and liana i'll come to you whatever and you know if you're having a hard time with it ask questions that's what we're here for so take the exercise start start the first one please don't work ahead because the exercises aren't always self-explanatory um and we like to explain them first extra pens that would have been really a smart thing for us to bring wouldn't it you'll get some for us all right yeah we'll we'll get some if you don't have a pen we'll get some there are a couple of pens up here um we'll get it we'll get some more the the hotel will bring us some but for now you know make do what you can i might actually have a couple as well i'll look we have not made it available online we are going to at some point the question was is this stuff available online um we has anyone out there has anyone out there enrolled in our career incident response audio series a couple of people um so the format of that course is something that we're going to probably replicate with some of this material basically we'll deliver effectively the slides um via audio like a podcast download and um deliver the exercises via email so it won't be in the same format but at some point we will probably in the next you know six 10 12 this is available exclusively at defcon yeah yeah honestly this was this was something we did just for defcon but as we were doing it we were like this stuff's kind of valuable people might get a kick out of this so we're trying to figure out what format we're going to put it in it won't look like this but it will be in a format that's more appropriate for delivery online any other thoughts or questions or stuff all right um so once you've started to talk about what you want out of life and where you are um the things that we like to talk about a lot are your aptitudes people spend a lot of time in the industry talking about skills and we talked about them earlier i'm good at network security i'm good at compliance i'm good at risk management those are skills but i would far rather be talking about what i call what i consider to be aptitudes the big things you know i'm good at math i'm a good writer i'm a good speaker um i am good at solving technical problems which i would hope most of you in the room are that is probably an aptitude for most of you and what aptitudes really are if you break them down are the things that you're talented at and they're also things that you're interested in because we all have things that we're talented at that we absolutely hate you know it totally sucks and we all have things that we're really interested in that we're just terribly bad at i mean i can't i love playing the guitar but man do i suck and i mean frankly i will never make a career out of it because i know i have no talent but i like it and it's fun the things that you want to focus on for your career are the things in the middle and we call those aptitudes on the flip side are deal breakers they're the things that are the opposite of aptitudes we consider the world breaks down into three into three areas you have strengths things that are your strengths you have weaknesses that matter things that are keeping you from getting where you want to go and you have weaknesses that don't matter the deal breakers are generally going to be the weaknesses that don't matter they're the things that you have no talent at and that you really don't enjoy and you have no interest in doing yeah and you can't tolerate you just won't put up with it and if you won't put up with it you don't want it as part of your career so it doesn't matter it can't matter if if your career relies on you doing something that you're terrible at and that you hate you're not going your career is not going to last very long so it's important to kind of call out what those things are and it's important to figure out what those things are because if you don't you're going to end up doing stuff you hate and i mean so in part of us doing this right so i actually myself went through these exercises and i actually went through this one specifically especially you know and and and i'm sure some of you guys have looked ahead within your um in your book but um i'm going to give you guys before we turn you loose on the exercise i'm going to actually give you some of my talents and some of my interests and maybe just give you a little idea and perspective and you know maybe you can tie some of it in is that i'm actually pretty satisfied in my job and because it actually pulls on a lot of these things so i mean some of my talents i relate well to a diverse group of people on a one-on-one basis that's a talent for me i i i it's it's it's it's not really a skill it's a talent um i have a lot of self-confidence i'm not easily intimidated um i'm not bored with repetition um i understand the value and have a very high def a high level definition of what hard work is i understand the rewards that come with it and i understand the sacrifice they get that that it entails i'm very good at verbally communicating to whether it's the guy who cuts my lawn or to the CEOs of companies that i represent i'm able to communicate up and down that scale and be able to relate to those people if you're going to talk about hardware business school stuff or what flowers to plant i have a very wide base of knowledge i'm very good at negotiation i'm very quick with numbers i have an excellent memory about very specific data points so i can make people feel very comfortable when i engage them in a conversation i could remember where you went to school or how many children you have or that your kid plays the bassoon um and i have a lot of attention to detail i'm very thorough in those things so if you think about kind of like some of the things that i do as a recruiter what do i have to do i talk to people all day i have to negotiate salaries contracts those types of things i have to deal with guys that work in security operation centers and i have to go out and you know negotiate the contracts with the large companies so having a little bit of a breath of kind of those types of things they seem to kind of gravitate towards some of the talents that i have that have been developed but they kind of are some things that become kind of ingrained um some of the interests i have main reason i got into recruiting is that i like helping people it's something i've always done since i'm a little kid and it's something that's a part of my life on a daily basis in work and outside of work um i love learning how businesses operates it's a big interest i will read any book about different business models how they work why they work how people got to where they got there i like to think that my family and my personal relationships with my friends is a huge interest of mine it's it's more of a driver um i have a circle of i've i'm real close with my family i got a real good close circle of friends and people i care about and when that happens i just kick in that's a huge anything that affects them is an interest of mine i like college athletics i play college baseball but i like college basketball college football i like the idea of people playing sports for it's a huge interest of mine i go to college world series almost every year and i really like informal learning i like listening to people talk and sharing experiences and trying to be able to relate to them so i mean those are all things when you start thinking about like kind of what it is like that's kind of the things that really kind of pulled me out like what really i'm talented and i'm good at and what really interests me um and then we talk about this other slide right we talked about you know strengths weaknesses weaknesses that don't matter right and dealbreakers right i'll give you some of my dealbreakers location i have to live nearest my wife's a playwright i have to live near a city where there's an active theater community i can't live in menfess where my mother lives i can't live in denver i can't live in houston i can live in chicago la or new york there's the only places i can live i hate bureaucracy can't stand it but i will never be my company will never be huge because i can't stand all the letters the levels of people um i can't tolerate people who accept mediocrity i just people who just show up and just do whatever's expected of them and that's it and that's all you're going to get i can't deal with that and i can't live with that um i can't live in environments like that i can't also live with a because i said so mentality i can't be in a place where somebody tells you do something then you ask them well why are we doing it this way they say because i'm your boss i can't deal with that i will probably can never work in a big company i can't stand lying and dishonesty and i just can't stand people who are disrespectful to others so if you took any of those things and put me in that environment it would not work for me it would just wouldn't work for me so when you start thinking about your deal breakers thinking about things that you know in your heart you can't deal with because those things will never change they will never change there are ingrained in your character i mean you start thinking about like some of my weaknesses right big weakness of mine big weakness of mine technology i struggle with it i mean like i'm mike's technology jester man i mean every time i mean you know i'm always like i'm like the guy that's like you know we fix my computer i it's it's really hard because i work in an industry of technologists and i struggle i get frustrated with it and over the last year i've learned a lot um mike might even attest to that but i i've learned a lot but it's um it's still a struggle for me um i um i i have i have i struggle with releasing control i i struggle with giving up um giving up control of things that i feel that i can do myself i also have a hard time with foreign languages now i'm never let's just say this i have no i have a big reason to learn more about technology i have a good reason to try to relinquish control and delegate more things but i have no pressing need to learn a foreign language i'm not going to relocate we're not going to start recruiting people in france so there's no real driver for me to learn a foreign language you know there are also things that i did used to struggle with that i was able to actually overcome i was horrible at reading contracts they would fluster me and i would be very difficult with dealing that but that's something that i had to become good at if i wanted to be in business so i had to learn how to read contracts and it's funny i have a friend a personal friend of mine who's an attorney that a lot of times it's almost scary because i use him sometimes but he'll take some of his other contracts and let me read him now and you say what do you think of the contract so it's kind of a crazy scenario that's something i became good at um i was also lousy at managing people lousy horrible at it very hard time with it um and it was something that i think i mean maybe my employees will tell me differently but i think that i've gotten better at it i think that i have gotten better at it but it's something i had to really work on to do and something i had to make a conscious effort to try to become better at so i think you guys are getting an idea of what kind of stuff you should be writing in this exercise i'm just getting interrupted because i i want to get us i want to get us on on track time wise um i think we're gonna start to speed this up so you're probably not going to finish the entire exercise but take five minutes um we'll start again at 210 the exercise the exercise is aptitudes and dealbreakers and uh you know flip to it if you don't have a uh if you don't have the the booklet yet um jan and andrea and melina are in the middle there they can uh they can give the they can give the booklet to you if you just uh walked in also if you have any questions raise your hand come see us whatever