[Music] Mike roie it's great to see you thanks for joining me today what would you like to see agencies do and what do you advise your government Partners to do to build their talent pools when cyber Talent is so tough to come by now well Fran thanks for thanks for having me and I appreciate you asking that question you know one of the one of the key areas that we look at when talking about talent development and retaining you know proper talented cyber Security Professionals is is we're all dealing with the same drains and resource pool there's a lot of a lot of good jobs out there there's a lot of great companies out there and what we need to do is we need to take a look at uh what are ways we can make a strategic advantage to keep our people to make our people happy uh when you look at a lot of the industry studies that are out there compensation is important but it's not the most important thing uh when you when you take a look it's really about employee satisfaction uh fulfillment with their job purpose and the way that we like to look at that internally at service now as well as talking with our federal and DOD counterparts are finding ways to make their day-to-day lives for employees better than what they what they have to do um when you when you look at each each job there's always mundane tasks there's always things that all right take a lot of time and you may not get the most benefit out of the time you put in that's really kind of demoralizing for employees specifically in the cyber security field and so we take a look and try to figure out what are some of the ways that we can improve employee experience to help them become more satisfied in their job and a lot of it really lends to Automation and using artificial intelligence yeah a lot of folks have talked about AI at this conference and in other venues as an automation tool for the purposes of relieving people of that task but those tasks but I'm not sure people have focused at least as much on the idea of the way that it enhances their experience as employees absolutely and that's that's the thing it's it's when you automate uh a mundan task let's look at uh a fishing example so in our security Operation Center we have the ability for all of our employees to report if they have a suspected fishing email that they receive well 20,000 plus employees imagine I'm many are in the dod if you're getting fishing emails and requests saying hey please investigate this we've been able to automate that process leveraging Ai and now instead of it taking a security analyst hours to research and determine whether this is a fishing attempt or not it's all handled by Automation and yes there's an occasional scenario where they need to jump in but what it's done is freed up the security analyst to now do more interesting jobs they get to jump in and do some threat hunting they get to go in and potentially get engaged on red teaming efforts which will ultimately help them grow help them think outside the box and is really going to benefit both the employee and their job satisfaction as well as us as a company uh you know we're going to have employees thinking bigger not just looking at the same thing every day and and finding better more efficient and effective ways that we can do business I want to ask you about both sides of the employee employer relationship what makes uh what's a good idea for the companies to do and for the Departments to do to invest in their people and what would you like to see the people do to contribute to their own career grow so that they become more valuable to the organizations they're associated with it's a great question so uh one of the things I love to tell organizations whether it's fed DOD customer civilian take a look at processes that you have in place that lend themselves to automation if you come in with an approach we're going to boil the ocean it's never going to work you're going to it'll be insurmountable you won't be able to uh effectively uh achieve the objectives that you're looking to do instead take bite-size chunks take care of things that lend themselves to automation get employee feedback get employee input on what they would like to see in areas where they can see uh valid Improvement in the way the the processes work so I think that's kind of the biggest advice I give to organizations is really don't bite off more than you can chew take a look what is automatable and and really start with that before jumping full full board in um on the flip side from an employee perspective I think it's it's really imperative on employees to look at their own career growth and take take hold of it grasp it uh you know people don't get promoted for doing the same job over over and over again people get promoted because they've doing they're doing a great job at what they're assigned to do and they're taking on more responsibilities they're looking at other options other opportunities for themselves to grow so I think that's the the biggest thing I'd tell you know employees is really look at look at what can you do what can you do better what can you do to grow and what are areas that you're interested in and that's ultimately going to keep them happier and and give you a better option better better ability to maintain that top talent it's great to have you on the show Mike thanks for joining me today