Information Security Analyst, David Cusack, Explains his Move to IT.
What was your job before Resolution IT?
I was a qualified electrician.
What prompted your move to IT?
Unfortunately, I had an accident resulting in a dislocated knee and broken ankle. Being an electrician, you spend a fair amount of time kneeling or balancing on your knees on joists or climbing scaffolding. My knee and ankle were struggling to cope doing this 40 hours a week, and I was told by the physiotherapist that carrying on would only make both worse, so I looked at my options.
IT and electrical work have a lot of transferrable skills such as fault finding and troubleshooting issues as well as having a blueprint-esque understanding of how something needs to be structured to work. The mindset is very similar with how you need to think outside the box and find a way to deliver the goal or to find the issue and fix it as it is never simple and straightforward being an electrician or working in IT.
IT also has the flexibility to work remotely which means I can in theory work from anywhere in the world rather than being limited to living locally and having to travel to and from work each day. Even just having the luxury of having days where you can work from home if necessary is a massive plus.
With that flexibility and similar mindset and transferrable skills, it was a no brainer to try IT.
How did you find the transition from a trade to IT?
I found the transition rather smooth. I approached the move as a clean slate, ready to use my transferrable skills and the new information learned from my peers to put me in the right direction to learn quickly and correctly so that I wasn’t developing bad habits.
How have you found the learning and development at Resolution IT?
Resolution IT have been very supportive of my learning and development. They provided study leave and course materials as well as covering the exam costs and in return I put the study time in my own time, and I repaid their faith by passing the exam. It is a win/win situation for both parties.
Because of this I found myself passing a lot of exams in the time I have been at Resolution IT, and I have learnt a great deal from it all which has made me better at my job and it means Resolution IT can maintain and improve on their excellent standard of service.
What does your job entail?
I am an Information Security Analyst who deals heavily with the vulnerability reporting. My job entails deploying vulnerability agents to endpoints and configuring and scheduling reports and scans to pull data from the endpoints to assess how many vulnerabilities are on the endpoint. With that information I can inform our Remediation Team to work on resolving the vulnerabilities and I also report to the clients on how many vulnerabilities they have in their environment and the work being done to reduce the vulnerabilities.
In addition to reporting, I also work with clients wanting to become Cyber Essentials compliant, which is a UK government backed scheme to show that companies have a minimum level of protection in cyber security through annual assessments to maintain the certification.
What’s your favourite part of your role?
I find it very satisfying seeing the number of vulnerabilities dropping as we continuously battle to reduce the vulnerabilities as much as possible. It shows what we are doing is working as we collaborate with the client to work on better practices for them to follow to make them work more securely with minimum to no disruption to their ability to work. IT is forever changing and with it there are new vulnerabilities and new updates and new methods of exploiting and new methods of remediating, so it is a constant battle that we are trying to stay on top of.
Are you glad you made the move?
100%. I appreciate my time as an electrician, but it has benefitted me with where I am now in IT and with it, I have the additional flexibility of taking my work with me wherever I am in the world without having to find new work locally.
Ready to make the move? Discover our trainee opportunities here.
