Keirsten Brager

I attribute my success to all of the people that have poured into me. I have been very, very fortunate. There are people that poured into me intentionally and not even knowing. Intentionally, my husband poured into me. He trained me for public speaking, he gave me his book collection when we first were getting to know each other. All of his questions were answered with, 'here, I have a book for that.' And then all the people in the industry who extended opportunities to me, or handed me a book from their collection, or just encouraged me to keep going, to take on the stretch assignments, to try something different, to teach, to actually share my knowledge, to build in public, even if I'm making mistakes. All those people, including the women who were just publishing either their concerns or what they were learning, all those people have poured into me, both intentionally and unintentionally. That is what made me the person that I am today.

The best career advice I ever received was to read every day, and very specifically, to read the Wall Street Journal paper edition every day. Reading the Wall Street Journal every day has helped me put a lot of things into context about why decisions are being made. In cybersecurity, there are geopolitical considerations, financial considerations, and people have certain incentives to make decisions, including hiding information from the public. A lot of what is in the Wall Street Journal print version is not in their online version. That advice alone has helped me the most in my career, because it gives me the context I need to understand the bigger picture.

The first thing I would tell them is to read my work, not because I'm trying to sell them anything, but because I didn't have it in writing available to me. I didn't have someone to say, 'here's how you negotiate this six-figure pay package,' or 'here's how the power utility industry works,' or 'here's how you navigate difficult conversations.' I had to figure it all out on my own. So I would tell women not just to read my work, but to find women that have been putting their content online this entire time. I recommend Christina Murillo's book '97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know,' Mark Carey's 'Tribe of Hackers Series,' and Maria Antoinetta Flores's book 'The Language of Cybersecurity.' I have published 'Secure the InfoSec Bag: Six-Figure Career Guide for Women in Security' and the rough draft of 'Grid Grace' on LinkedIn to help women understand the power utility industry specifically. They can start with the Tribe of Hackers series, Christina Murillo's book, my six-figure career guide, and everything else from there. That would be the foundation I would recommend for anyone new coming to the industry. You get real answers from the actual people in the field doing the work, not just the fluff you could get from formal interviews.

I always say opportunities rather than challenges. The biggest opportunities right now are bringing people transitioning from other industries and bringing their talent and their ideas into the power utility industry to help us further secure all of the processes that we have, and also so that we can expand capacity. I don't believe that cutting heads is the right approach. I believe that we should be expanding capacity, and the way to do that is to bring the best and the brightest from those other industries so that we can create better products and services for our customers, and our shareholders will benefit from that. More specifically around AI, that's where the efficiency gains will come from. So getting AI expertise into the power utility industry, not so that we can cut headcount, but so that we can increase capacity, that's the biggest opportunity for us right now. Anyone with an information security background who adds the AI GRC component to it is going to be the best positioned to succeed going into the future.

Trust and integrity are the most important values to me in my work and personal life. You have to have integrity in order to do this work, and we have to be able to trust you. The work that we do affects public safety, and people can die. So it is very important to have trust and integrity in the line of work that we do.