3 Skills Could Make or Break Your Cybersecurity Career in the Age of Generative AI

Indeed, reports that nearly one in five jobs is heavily exposed to generative AI. Technology has proven to benefit cybersecurity careers, automating threat data analysis and allowing cybersecurity professionals to focus more on risk mitigation. And let’s face it, given the number of high-profile breaches we’ve seen in recent months, from MOVEit to Johnson Controls, cybersecurity professionals need all the help they can get.

Generative AI can be a powerful tool for identifying new risks and alerts, but using it requires a unique skill set. When interviewing cybersecurity candidates, I look for three essential soft skills: lateral thinking, perseverance, and communication.

1. Lateral thinking

While many employers emphasize problem-solving skills in job descriptions, the ability to think outside the box is imperative when it comes to cybersecurity. Candidates must be able to adapt quickly when facing real-time risks and threats. For example, a good candidate with lateral thinking skills will consider how new technologies such as generative AI can be integrated with existing resources to more quickly identify security risks and streamline operations.

In addition to its benefits, generative AI introduces data security and privacy concerns that we cannot ignore. While candidates need to know how to use this technology to their advantage, they also need to understand how large language models (LLMs) can exploit and compromise organizations’ internal data. Unsurprisingly, almost half of executives fear that integrating generative AI will lead to new attacks on their AI models, services or data. Security professionals must be proactive and ask how new threats can bypass existing tools and processes. They must be able to look for new ways to approach challenges, whether that means putting themselves in the attacker’s perspective or discovering new vulnerabilities.

To assess whether a candidate has lateral thinking skills, the interviewer should focus on situational questions demonstrating how they used different resources to overcome a challenge. I often ask, “Tell me about a time when you were faced with significant ambiguity or limited information and had to act.” »