What is Perseverance?
Perseverance: persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.
Ironically, I started writing this blog a couple months ago and initially struggled to get some momentum.
No two people reading this are alike, but some of us may handle various challenges and decisions in similar ways. We all face hurdles, but how we respond to them makes the biggest difference in what direction our lives and careers will go.
But it’s also more than that. How we plan and mentally prepare ourselves for these scenarios greatly affects how we will ultimately need to – or better yet, choose to – react when faced with challenges.
We will be tested.
The job market is one of those tests.
Take a moment to recover from the shock.
The headlines right now are not great, and it’s not just the cybersecurity industry. Many job seekers have found this to be the most difficult time in their careers to land a job, and they are considering different professional directions. That’s devastating, although it certainly can force some to finally take that leap they’d always dreamed about. The tough job market often compounds with newfound stressors in our personal lives, creating an overwhelming cloud that can be tough to eradicate.
During my eight years in cybersecurity and IT recruiting, I spoke to many candidates in similar situations, but their responses and interpretations of the situations were vastly different. Many were genuinely optimistic, but the vast majority sounded like they had forgotten just how capable they were.
Positioning yourself effectively to identify and secure a job is a craft that requires a skill set encompassing several key areas, which we can continually evolve, measure, adapt, and reflect on. Improving these skills may prove to be one of the smartest decisions we make over the course of our careers! Let’s dive in.
Get Your Mind Right
Do you believe you are going to achieve your goal? It’s not as easy as snapping your fingers. It requires conviction and the confidence of knowing that with each effort you make, you are working towards your goal and improving your job hunting skills along the way. This won’t be the last time you find yourself on the hunt. Your actions today could very well contribute to some amazing things happening for you!
They just might not be right now.
The definition of perseverance includes a “delay in achieving success,” and for this reason, go all in on your decisions with conviction and the expectation that they will yield positive results eventually. Be reasonably optimistic. Five years ago, I was a cybersecurity recruiter meeting a candidate to discuss a penetration tester role. We became pals, and five years later, he became my boss at a training and consulting company I am so proud to represent every day. It happens – one conversation led to a relationship that led to a career change.
Approach your job search with patience and remain committed to the fact that some of today’s seemingly irrelevant interactions, connections, mentions, and even rejections could eventually change your life tremendously.
Or at the very least, make your life easier the next time you need to explore the market.
Determine the ROI of Your Efforts
The job search is grueling. However, it doesn’t have to be a waste of time. With everything you do to find that gig, there is an opportunity to discover something about how you operate and how your choices influence your direction (for better or worse). Every application submitted gives you data points to reflect on. Take note of:
- What seems to work well consistently vs. what approach gets crickets
- What takes you forever to complete vs. what you can automate
- Who is responsive vs. who you can cross off your list
- Who you can trust + who you want to support + who could be your boss someday
- You have no idea what the ROI is, but you still feel like it could be a great idea – go for it
Review the Data from Your Job Search
Let’s say you applied to 352 jobs this year, and received just a handful of responses. You didn’t just apply and cross your fingers…right? Open up a spreadsheet and start tracking:
- types of roles and responsibilities
- job titles
- experience required and how your experience aligns with the requirement
- profiles of their team members, including their backgrounds and training
- your connection to the company
- the types of companies and how many times you applied to each
- response emails you received
- if a recruiter was involved
- the posting says remote, but all team members are in one location
- salary range targets and what you asked for
- how much time you spent applying and interviewing
- any additional networking or self-advocating actions you took in tandem with submitting a resume
This is just a starting point! Do you see any trends or themes? If something doesn’t work, try it again and again until you know it’s not effective and move on. If it does work, try it again and when you know it’s effective, retrace your steps to determine why it worked.
The more you learn about what works best for you, the less time you will spend applying to opportunities that are unlikely to work out when you look for a new job in the future.
Look at your actions as code, all part of some fancy algorithm that automates your career for you over time. If you can really nail down which action items bring the best ROI, you should eventually find the jobs coming to you.
From all my years of experience working directly with active job seekers, those who identify action items that bring a higher return on investment tend to find it much easier to persevere through the tough times. They know what works for them, and they rely on these to eventually yield results.
Networking: Determine Your Boundaries
If you spend five minutes on LinkedIn, you’ll see multiple posts stressing the need to network. Oftentimes, the advice given is copied and pasted from a million other similar posts. AdviceGPT. It’s not necessarily bad advice at all, but it generally lacks awareness and fails to recognize how unnatural a lot of networking is for a large percentage of the audience.
Many people consider social interaction one of their least favorite activities, and even fewer enjoy initiating it.
A lot of the advice given overlooks the wide gap between the social comfort levels needed to take action on the suggestions, as well as the social comfort levels of the recipients of your networking attempt.
The first key to successful networking is understanding which types of networking approaches best align with your personality and comfort zone. A simple rule of thumb is:
Try everything at least once, but twice is better.
Establish Boundaries
To define your comfort zone, you must establish boundaries. To define boundaries, you must test them. Every networking suggestion made should be on the table for consideration. If you try it and you absolutely hate it, that’s okay. Now you know. Maybe that ends up being a boundary, but you must try it first. If you send a message to a stranger on LinkedIn and you don’t get a response, it doesn’t mean you failed. If you felt comfortable doing it and took the time to make it count, keep it as part of your tools used and within the boundaries of your comfort zone.
Maybe you find your sweet spot as a “commenter” and you simply become known for always congratulating everyone on their achievements. I have personally reached out to dozens of people online offering my time and help purely because I saw them bring positivity to every interaction with others online.
Networking Tips for Introverts
If you consider yourself an introvert, there’s one key thing to remember: you are not alone! A large population of the IT and cybersecurity industry is introverted. The first time you put yourself out there may also be someone else’s first time. When you meet, you might realize you both have the PJPT, and that you both have the same gaming chair you considered selling when you couldn’t find a job. You get each other’s Discord handles so you can now communicate with each other in the way you both prefer to dialogue with humans.
If you consider yourself an extrovert, you should be really pushing the boundaries. If there is an email, phone number, DM, or in-person opportunity to capitalize on, you should be exploring it. You may possess the gift of humility, ego, confidence, or just being aloof – but that often gives you an edge over most introverts. Take advantage of this or admit to yourself that you just don’t want it as badly as you think you do. It can be a superpower.
Networking with Recruiters
Recruiters can waste a lot of your time, but can also make your job search a dream. Make a point to build a rapport with the good ones. Trust is hard to establish, but when you do find it with a recruiter, you can drastically improve the ROI of your job search over many years of your career. The bad ones – two strikes, tops, and cut them loose. I will cover how to interact with recruiters in future blogs.
Final Thoughts
None of it matters if you don’t have the right frame of mind. Your networking will suffer, which limits the long-term upside of magical things happening to your career. The data you measure won’t be truly representative of your efforts.
If you can look at your job search as a craft you can get better at every day, the little victories will start to stand out. Practice will help you become a better job seeker every time you need to join the job hunt. Going through it and seeing the success is the best ingredient to perseverance, but it all starts with the mindset.
There are many other impactful areas needing perseverance in this challenging cybersecurity job market, and we will explore them in upcoming blogs from this series.
About the Author: Joe Hudson
Joe Hudson is a dad, husband, and manager of several fantasy football teams. He is a former elementary school teacher, spending nine years educating military and public school students with a primary focus on building confidence, problem solving, and strong communication skills. He started a new chapter of his career in 2015 as a tech recruiter, where he was first exposed to his new love for cybersecurity.
He has met with and helped thousands of people all over the world with career advice and regularly participates in podcasts, livestreams, and presentations to continue offering time and updated tips. He is currently the Director of Growth with TCM, where he oversees consulting and training partnerships with orgs globally. He loves meeting with people, and he loves being a teammate. His current boss is a former placement, a great example of how we never know where life is going to take us.
About TCM Security
TCM Security is a veteran-owned, cybersecurity services and education company founded in Charlotte, NC. Our services division has the mission of protecting people, sensitive data, and systems. With decades of combined experience, thousands of hours of practice, and core values from our time in service, we use our skill set to secure your environment. The TCM Security Academy is an educational platform dedicated to providing affordable, top-notch cybersecurity training to our individual students and corporate clients including both self-paced and instructor-led online courses as well as custom training solutions. We also provide several vendor-agnostic, practical hands-on certification exams to ensure proven job-ready skills to prospective employers.
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