Refining your role once you get the pay you want

DatabaseHead

Strange title, so my apologies.

Just curious how you approach this situation. You work your way up to a certain level, pay, experience etc..... Now you find what you like and what do you don't like and want to do more of what you do like. How do you manage this situation?

Let's say just for the sake of the scenario 50% of your job you like and 50% you don't like. You want to get more 80/20, I think realistically you will at best get a 90/10 split, so 80/20 IMO is about the best you can hope for in most cases.

Do you begin to look for other jobs to change the weighting of the 50/50 to 70/30 or even 80/20? I am older and have defined myself in the space I currently work but want to hone a few more skills to close the gap. While I am learning still and most certainly do not hate my job, it's more 50/50 right now. It's not bad at all, in fact I can stay for a year easy or longer.

Thanks for any feedback...

TechGromit

I guess that really depends on what you mean by work you don't want to do. If say you a pentester, you love the 50% of the job pen testing part, but hate the other 50% writing the reports. Sorry to break it to you, not going to happen. Writing good documentation and reports is part of the job, just no way your going to get away with 100% pen testing. Can you give us an example what tasks you find icky to do in you job?

powerfool

If there are parts of your job that you don't like, make a process around those parts that makes it easier to navigate for yourself. Also, if you are in a senior position, have someone more junior start the work and then you go over it and mentor them. You aren't going to drastically reduce it, but you can improve it... them's just the breaks.

ITSec14

How approachable is your manager? Sometimes just flat out having that conversation can be a good thing. You don't want to have multiple roles and only be okay at them. Ideally, you will want to focus on your area of interest and master it. I like vulnerability management and want to learn more about pentesting, but I also write security policies too (among other things). Do I want to continue to be relied on to write policies? Heck no!

If your company knows they can have someone dedicated to a particular area, I would consider that a win for both the company and the individual.

jibtech

ITSec14 wrote: »

How approachable is your manager? Sometimes just flat out having that conversation can be a good thing. You don't want to have multiple roles and only be okay at them. Ideally, you will want to focus on your area of interest and master it. I like vulnerability management and want to learn more about pentesting, but I also write security policies too (among other things). Do I want to continue to be relied on to write policies? Heck no!

If your company knows they can have someone dedicated to a particular area, I would consider that a win for both the company and the individual.

We are going to have some fun conversations come Monday....