Why do cybersecurity experts leave? (and how can we make them stay)

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Why do cybersecurity experts leave?

As a particular skill shortage in the cybersecurity industry keeps relentlessly growing, the challenge of retaining existing security experts becomes more and more critical. While there are obvious reasons spurring employees to consider changing a position, such as a more generous compensation offer, career growth, better work-life balance, etc., there’s a couple of less apparent, at times, even latent – wear and boredom. Indeed the pair does look unnatural at first glance; after all, wear is perceived as a result of excessive workload, while boredom, on the contrary, seems to be an outcome of lack of such. There’s an entirely different kind of boredom, one stems from an unhealthy ratio between complex, requiring deep understanding and exercising profound expertise tasks and relatively trivial, quantitative by nature.

A typical Cinderella tale giving birth to this eventual posture goes like this:
An entry-level engineer is being assigned a list of basic ongoing tasks requiring neither experience nor a deep understanding of an organization’s global architecture and context. As time goes by, more and more decision making is being deligated as one’s professional growth takes place. Time and again long term projects and optimization of existing configuration and procedures are being assigned to the one, who is now considered to be an asset by any measure. And here comes the catch, a vast pile of duties accumulated along the years is still there, haunting and stalking. Two key reasons contribute to this: There’s always a workforce shortage to host the offload and a false assumption that due to one’s experience and domain expertise, no one will perform as proper handling these routines.

This course of managerial decision-making creates a wide span of highly skilled professionals dealing with repetitive, tedious, exhausting, but above all, boring and, as a result, mentally draining daily routines wasting priceless resources, causing a gradual degradation in engagement and performance.
In other words, highly qualified employees are being deprived of the opportunity to swap their historical job description with a new set, appropriate to their level of competence, and loose interest. Naturally, both sides are paying a high price.

So, what can be done to invoke a healthy, empowering relationship with your top employees without settling for any less than the best, even in most trivial tasks? After all, God is in the details!

What can we do?

Ultimately, automation.

Providing your teams with intuitive and elegant containers to pour their knowledge into, and letting them convert repetitive, frequently massive, routines into managed, consistent, and well-documented chunks and structures will do the trick.

Implementing an automation-based framework and mindset in your organization will generate a
shift in fundamental assumptions regarding SLA, knowledge inheritance, load delegation, and overall processes control.

A tremendous shift from decision execution to decision making.

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