Keeping Your Edge Should Not Keep You On Edge

Your behavioral cybersecurity skillset is a risk vector.

You were hired based in large part on your competencies, which means exactly that on Day 1 you were the person with the greatest degree of competence in whatever was determined to be the job's skillset: financial analysis, AI risk mitigation, systems analysis.

Over time, things started to happen both in terms of life events -- births, deaths, illnesses -- and business events -- emergent technology, business disruptions, your own development.

These changes leave traces. Even if you can't see them, you've changed.

Consider the three pictures in this post of the sculpture "Knife Edge" by Henry Moore. The top picture is the model from 1961, the middle picture is the model from 1976, and the bottom picture is from 2004. What do you see?

Two significant differences are apparent. First, the initial framework for the sculpture, and likely for your career, had a set of expectations, skillsets, and environments. Then things changed and you grew a set of skills, changed your environment, faced different challenges in different ways. In these pictures indicated by statue color and dirt. Second, over time you changed again with a move to maybe a different locale, different level of responsibility, different challenges.

As we point out repeatedly the entities you work against are constantly improving their attack capacity. With AI, the attack frequency and the capacity are improving; for example a recent report from the Taiwanese government noted that the frequency of foreign cyberattacks on its infrastructure went from 1.23 million attacks each day (yes that's right, 1.23 million attacks each day) in 2023 to 2.63 million attacks each day in 2025. 

Ask yourself this: what would that type of tempo mean for you in terms of improving your system capacity? And not just systems capacity, your personal capacity to deal with that pace?

You adapt your skillset.

Your best resource is to understand yourself in terms of the talents you have had over time. Please, pretty please, do NOT think of yourself in terms of competencies. What gives you an edge? How has that changed as you've grown as a professional, as a person, and as you've moved into different roles? What do you know about your talents now that you would like to go back and tell your early cybersecurity professional self?

Keeping your edge should not keep you on edge, it should make you sharp.

Ask us how you can find and maintain your changing talent advantage needs.

(photo credits:

1961, Wiki05, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons;

1976, Elena Ternovaja, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons;

2004, Acediscovery, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)