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Life Of A Cybersecurity Analyst: How To Get Through Your First Week Working As A Cybersecurity Analyst

life of a cybersecurity analyst
Career Tips / Cyber Security / General

Life Of A Cybersecurity Analyst: How To Get Through Your First Week Working As A Cybersecurity Analyst

The first day at work for new employees is usually activity-packed, full of adrenaline rush and a blend of emotions oscillating from the excitement of beginning new work to getting worried, nervous, and paranoid. This is no different considering the life of a cybersecurity analyst.

As a cybersecurity analyst, you should be of sober temperament, and highly flexible. Your first day could be when a cyber-attack is being launched, and your service will be immediately required without further ado. Therefore, take it easy and timely handle occurrences.

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Techniques to save the life of a cybersecurity analyst on the first day at work in a new position

The life of a cybersecurity analyst, especially on the first day of work in a new position can be very unpredictable. If you are to go through it with ease, consider these strategies to make it less strenuous. We look at personal, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and environmental skills to save the day.

Personal and intrapersonal techniques

Personal and intrapersonal are those activities and preparations that involve you as an individual right from the mindset, mood, spirits, and emotions. Preparations under this umbrella are as follows.

  • Personal grooming– a proper selection, blending, and style is essential from hairdo, clothing, to shoe type. How an individual dress signals a lot about who they potentially could be. A decent donning that oozes respect, class, and sense of direction should be chosen. Good grooming inadvertently makes you feel comfortable, friendly, and attractive to workmates. A suit and tie or a semi-casual demeanor that is not overdone also does the magic.
  • Evaluating and keeping your personality in check. Unresolved personal wars with inner self and outer self should be discarded right at the workplace entrance. Fellow employees do not deserve lousy energy to radiate from a new employee as this could last your entire working period and resultantly impede your productivity.
  • It’s advisable to usually pen down their vision and goals throughout the entire stay, draft a personal mission statement, enumerate all the ideas, plans, and technical know-how they would progressively want to inject, and implement. This provides fuel to propel you daily.
  • Once fully acquainted with the workplace, tabulate a 30/60/90 or whichever preset time intervals plan. As this builds up over time, you can gauge against your plans and adjust accordingly.

Interpersonal techniques

Interpersonal entails worker-to-worker rapport and exchanges, employer-to-employee interactions, senior rank vs. junior rank mode of communication, and even subordinate staff-to-employee association.

Having a template written or unwritten, with deatiled traditions on how all parties should blend and socialize, boundaries and delimitations of interactions, etc. are necessary to ensure that there’s no feud between employees. Interpersonal attributes needed are:

  • Be inquisitive. Do not feel that you’re nagging by asking question after question. All the employees were once in a similar situation, and by seeking answers, they got to know the ins and outs. Some of the questions relevant to a Cybersecurity analyst include; Who is the head of the Cybersecurity department? What level of qualifications do employees hold? What type of awards were won? Questions to be asked are too many to enlist.
  • Get to know initials and name prefixes to be used when addressing each other. A senior cybersecurity analyst probably gets addressed as S.C. Knowing and grasping all these acronyms eases identification.
  • Over time get to know all employees by names, departments they work in, job groups they are placed in, and other employee variables. More importantly, get to know all fellow cybersecurity analysts and roles specialization and begin the hunt for a mentor.

Surviving the day: workplace and environmental techniques

A workplace dramatically influences how your first week maybe.

  • Prefer to primarily get briefed on urgent matters of going concern to be attended to at the workplace before anything else. Common tasks such as round-the-clock protection and monitoring of the organization’s data and a time to time risk assessment from all endpoints within an organization are predominantly repetitive and are likely to never get a break.
  • Determining the distance between the workplace and play of stay should direct you to identify a suitable mode of transport when commuting to and fro, security issues in between the two places are important to know because a cybersecurity analyst always walks around with expensive tools of the trade and making choices on whether to relocate to an area nearby for safety and convenience can be reconsidered.
  • Research extensively about your new workplace. Get to understand all about it, the founders, year of establishment, current financial status and positioning, affiliates, and subsidiaries interlinked to it. This information brings cybersecurity new employees up to speed and makes him or her act in line to them.
  • Get to know the time and schedules of daily events. Know when to report, when to leave work, types of leave and off days, and earmarked days of a calendar. Know daily tasks evenly distributed for the week. This kind of duty roster always saves the day in the life of a cybersecurity analyst and helps to plan prior all needs required for different days.
  • Adopt a bad guy or malicious hacker mindset and persona. This puts you in their shoes and pa typical thinking on how company data is exploited. This mentality at the workplace places you a step ahead of a threat actor. This should be on autopilot and automated throughout your career.

life of a cybersecurity analyst

  • As a cybersecurity analyst, identify within the company a place where daily journals, record archives, and workplace logs are shelved. Logs refer to daily entries made by security analysts detailing every single activity done and outcome. Skim through all the past records to bring you up to speed on various aspects focused on your domain.
  • During the first week, orient yourself with all the physical structures, machines, and tools. In a cybersecurity space, standard features are Graphical Processing Units(GPUs), Simulators for demonstrating actual-world cyber-attacks in a computer, Servers and model types, Networking gadgets, and the internet service providers, the network topology laid down. There are hundreds of devices and an analyst should know them all.
  • Fire up your workspace; it could be an open office setup or an enclosed one. Organize all your stuff, books, stationery, and gadgets. An organized workspace makes one have a clear mind, quick location of items for use, avoids destructions and crashes that can arise either from entangled wires, cramped up table, gadgets precariously dangling at the desk’s edges to the overcrowded table and generally, orderliness exhibits a positive image to visitors.
  • Know all the employee amenities and their locations within the organization, e.g., cybersecurity syndicate rooms for converging when brainstorming on several cybersecurity issues emerging or affecting the company, the gym, washrooms, and restrooms where employees can unwind after a tiresome day. Personal mental and physical fitness is highly advised as healthy and energetic employees are productive, and paralysis of tasks is evaded.
  • Get department and organization landline contacts at your desk. Worthy organizations have workplace telephones in all offices. Knowing who to dial is excellent for timely communication, request seeking, non-physical problem solving, and guidance, and also to uniformly and entirely converging all employees to a central place in real-time whenever an impromptu meeting arises or when an attack unexpectedly hits.
  • Another survival tactic is locating emergency exits. It seems less important but extremely cardinal to know exit doors, fire extinguishers’ strategic positions, emergency cushioning and protective paraphernalia, and alarms to send signals whenever danger lurks. It’s imperative always to take note of this.

Conclusion

The life of a cybersecurity analyst is full of firefighting-like events as a near threat-miss can be fatal to an organization or business. And it doesn’t help to imagine all this pressure coupled with a new role, probably in a new company. Using these techniques to save the day and survive your first day or week in a new cybersecurity role is crucial.

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