Soo, Job Crafting Is A Thing?

Think for a moment.

What is your dream job or career? If there were no barriers to doing what you love everyday, what would you choose to be doing?

For me, it would be nothing but penetration testing and ethical-hacking.

Being that I just entered the Information Security field, I knew that it would be unlikely that I would be doing this 100% of the time but I knew that I could have a dream start as a Security Analyst where I would do it some of the time. Eventually it would lead me to my ultimate dream job of being a Penetration Tester.

My dream came true....and then it stopped. I can't exactly go into why it just stopped but what I can say is that my company is very excited for me to be in this 'new' Security role. Why are they so excited? Because according to them I get to shape my role. I was told its something I should be thrilled about.

Initially, I felt like I had just lost my dream start job (and I still do to an extent). My intention coming fresh into the InfoSec field was to gain experience and learn the ropes from a mentor. My mentor was my supervisor. My supervisor was the ONLY security professional at the company. I'm the second. He is no longer my supervisor. Without going into all the long details, it was decided that I would do security with the system administrators team. The day to day work of a sys admin does and can relate to information security work but its not ALL of what security duties entail.

Prior to this change in my role, my daily routine went something like this:

• Check the IDS (Intrusion Detection System) for alerts and threats
• Investigate any security incidents and escalate them as needed
• Perform vulnerability scans on internal applications
• Conduct penetration tests to validate any findings from the scans
• Take part in raising security awareness

That's a short overview of what most of my day consisted of. It was so much FUN!! I knew my what my purpose was and it felt right. To add on to the awesomeness of it all, I was of course getting paid to have fun with that work, and I worked in the location I applied to work in.

Fast forward to present day, and I have yet to be given a job title or job description. I'm told this takes time - - - how much time, I have no clue but I imagine it can't take this long. I now work in a location much further away than I agreed to and I'm bored. I don't feel motivated to be there anymore. The only thing I'm 'sure' about in this role, is that I have to read a bunch of documentation and watch a bunch of training videos. Aside from that, I still have no clue what this new role is suppose to look like. I will say that I've had two awesome people on the sys admin team trying to show me all that they do on a daily basis and I've been really appreciative of it. They've actually told me that it was really hard for them when they started because there was no training and they were essentially told to just go read the documentation and figure it out. With that being what they experienced they've been doing their best to be as helpful to me as possible. Their awesome and they've made this period of limbo feel a little less heavy.

After grieving the loss of what I was once doing, I started to think about the potential benefits of shaping my new security role into a role that fits my career projection needs. I listened to NPR's Hidden Brain episode on Dream Jobs and it was there that I learned about job crafting. Job crafting is how an employee reframes their work, physically, socially and cognitively.

When an employee is given a job description or set number of tasks expected of their working time, regardless of the content, there remains the actual doing the job. In this process, the employee will determine the physical and cognitive boundaries of the job and engage the social relationships required to perform the job. When any one of these elements of the job are altered by the employee, they are said to be 'job crafting' (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

In other words, an employee could determine the tasks that they perform while also changing their perspective around what the role entails. This change in perspective would then lead to how and who we interact with in order to successfully do the work.

This is all fine and dandy and I'm really into overcoming mental barriers but I'm sort of stuck on trying to craft a role that I don't have extensive experience in and where I have yet to have someone mentor me in my new field. I should note that having a mentor and learning the ropes was something I was very clear about during the interview process. Because I'm relatively fresh, I of course wanted some direction. I don't think this is unreasonable to ask for. I've learned a lot on my own and now I just really want some guidance from someone in the field. Being that this is not an option at the moment, I'm left to figure out what exactly my new purpose is. I see the pros that come with this but if I'm being honest, it hasn't benefited me and my career projection just yet. I'm staying open to this opportunity and really feel as though there are some very smart people at the company that I can learn a lot from. The learning process is just harder when there's not much guidance. Even when I was doing self-study, I had guidance from online courses and forums.

To help myself in learning what this new role may potentially look like, I've created a list of the duties that I'd like to learn and do. I've also searched different job titles and job descriptions that may be along the lines of what I'm supposed to be doing now. Has this helped? Somewhat, sure. But until I'm in the groove of a daily routine, I'll be winging it along the way. That seems to be what this company does. Winging it is not for everyone, and I've learned that I value organization. This isn't to say that I'm not flexible because I am. If I wasn't, I wouldn't still be showing up each day ready to learn. What I am saying though is that winging it when your new to a career may not be the best way to really develop into the expert you someday want to be. I'm hoping that crafting my new security role will benefit me beyond what I foresee. Until then, I will continue doing what I love (ethical-hacking) outside of work until it becomes a part of my daily duties again.

Present Day: I no longer work at this company. While I learned a ton in this role, there were way too many red flags. I encourage you to grasp the red flags I make note of in this blog post. I'm much happier these days in a role doing what I love :)

Signed,

Ro0t $>