Cyber TAU Decision Support

Sometimes I am asked how Pythia Cyber came to even offer NIST CSF-themed cybersecurity talent assessments for engineers, for managers and for leaders. The answer is my career has included both executive decision support (making data tell a useful story) and cybersecurity (maximizing authorized access to digital assets while minimizing unauthorized access).

The technical part of cybersecurity gets all the attention and is mostly pretty well understood. The Talent Acquisition & Upskilling part, TAU, is so often overlooked.

While moving along these different tracks  of technical cybersecurity and executive decision support I often wished that I could do for cybersecurity TAU what I was doing for executive decision support: gather data and put it into context. But to that I would need someone who was a research psychologist, a partner organization that built assessments, and a colleague who could tune team dynamics. Putting all these pieces together created Pythia Cyber.

A way to look at the assessments is that they have both the data and the insight to make candidates for hiring or for promotion much less of a gamble. Hiring and promoting are both about the future, which is a big part of why they are so much harder that performance reviews which are about the present.

Predicting the future is hard. Which of these candidates will turn out to have been a good fit? Which of these employees will turn out to have been a potential leader? When hiring, the problem is evaluating experience from other environments and trying to figure out equivalences. When promoting, the problem is trying to figure out how an employee will behave in a new role.

Promoting is complicated by two factors: you don't want to lose what you already have and you don't know what someone can do if they have never had the chance to show you. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so some people feel that "standing out" is how you get promoted; but standing out is often a form of grandstanding or self-promotion, neither of which is a good indicator of management or leadership potential. On the other hand that quiet, dedicated employee may not be showing any leadership potential because you haven't asked them to or they may not be showing any leadership potential because they possess no leadership potential.

As with other kinds of executive decision support the goal of the Pythia Cyber assessments is not to select an individual but rather to support you in selecting an individual. We can only tell you what an individual is likely to do in broad categories of situation: it is up to know to figure out which assessed individual meets your current and future needs.