CyAN Mentorship Wrap-Up – 2025-1
CyAN is nearing the end of its spring 2025 mentorship programme. We extend a sincere thank you to our members who have agreed to contribute to the development of new talent entering the information security sector: Saba Bahgeri (Australia), Mohammed Shakil Khan (UAE), Mathew Nicho (UAE), Shantanu Bhattacharya (Australia), Bharat Raigangar (UAE), and John Salomon (Spain), and to the mentees they have worked with for 3 months.
In 2023, our then-Secretary General James Briscoe and I decided that it would make sense for CyAN to try and create a mentorship programme. CyAN’s mission includes contributing to the security, trust, safety, and resilience around the global information space. This involves helping to strengthen the talent pipeline for an industry perpetually struggling with identifying and supporting new professionals.
More importantly, mentorship is a way for CyAN members to share their knowledge and experience with the next generation. Many of us were fortunate enough in the early stages of our careers to benefit from established experts who took the time to help us getting started, whether by answering questions or making introductions to their own networks; it seemed only fair to give the CyAN community a way to do the same. As importantly, mentorship is a great way for those of us with long careers behind us to learn from fresh faces about new technologies, norms, attitudes, and methods of working. Every generation brings new experiences and approaches that can help us as mentors continue to develop our skills and ways of thinking, as we help our successors to leverage and develop their own qualities.
The 2023 pilot was an experiment in learning-by-doing. CyAN had a lot of opportunity to expand our membership and activities after its first few years of existence, and the launch of our mentorship project was just one of many ways to get members engaged and to raise CyAN’s profile across the industry. With 6 mentors and 7 candidates, everything about the pilot was improvised, sometimes from scratch, sometimes from borrowing from our experience with other such initiatives. Nonetheless, the pilot was a rewarding experience all around, with several of the candidates going on to join CyAN as active and contributing members. We look forward to the contributions the mentees will make to CyAN, whether through blog posts, podcasts, presentations, or other ways of teaching us about their own projects and knowledge, and in turn encourage all CyAN members to continue to support them as new members, with the same level of networking help and other professional support that is a hallmark of our professional community.
After a break in 2024 to focus on membership growth and consolidation, we’re now nearing the end of our second mentorship run. The cohort of candidates is refreshingly diverse, including both female and male students and recent graduates from the APAC and South Asia region, while 2023 was more focused on EMEA and North America. Likewise, our mentors represent the demographics of our growing membership, whether in terms of professional profile, location, or who they are as individuals.
As our first intake for 2025 starts wrapping up, we are already planning for a second group of mentors and candidates in the second half of the year. We’re in discussion with numerous other friendly associations and schools to identify promising candidates for the next intake, and look forward to bringing yet another group of fresh, motivated, smart faces into the organisation.