An Inspirational Mentor Story of Rajnish Garg — Singapore

Rajnish Garg is working as a Solutions Engineer, ASEAN for Cyberark Singapore. He is responsible for the presales consulting activities around identity security domain. The activities include identifying the pain points of customers, solution designing, architecting, and conducting demonstration & POC etc. to help the large enterprises and banking/financial customers in their entire digital transformation journey.

Previously, Rajnish has worked with IXIA Singapore as an APJ SE Specialist for more than 4 years where he helped customers around setting up the Cyber Threat Defence systems at the National and Enterprise level. He worked around the Network Security domain.

Overall, Rajnish has more than 10 years of experience in Cyber Security Industry and currently, he holds various certification such as CISSP, AWS Solution Architect Professional and Certified Kubernetes Administrator/Developer.

He is an ex-co member with Centre for Strategic Cyberspace & International Studies (CSCIS), and sub-committee member with ISC2 Singapore Chapter.

What do you like the most in Cybersecurity field?

With all the new risks and security challenges to be addressed around continuous digital transformation and ever-changing IT landscape, Cybersecurity is evolving at a very rapid pace, and it has become so broad with so many different domains and subjects.

This dynamic nature of Cybersecurity industry gives me a chance to learn new trends, new technologies and new way of reducing the security risks.

How did you get into Cybersecurity and what do you enjoy most as a mentor in Cybersecurity?

In 2010, I joined company named IXIA India as solutions engineer where I worked in network security domain. However, in 2014, when I joined company named Verint Systems (Now named as Cognyte) that’s where I fully immersed myself in the security, as we were enabling Governments, Defence and Service Providers across the world to catch the suspects and stop the cyber-attacks.

I enjoy the new and fresh perspective of the mentees. And to advise them based on my own experiences. Most of the time, it gives me chance to reflect upon how I would have handled similar situations.

Why are you interested in being a mentor in Cybersecurity field?

Over the last 10 years, I got lot of opportunities to learn from my colleagues, peers, and customers. They were able to guide me on how to perform better in my day-to-day job. But I never had the opportunity to have a proper mentor who can give me overall view, how to excel in Cybersecurity Industry. That’s why I thought of becoming a mentor.

And I hope having a greater number of mentors in Cybersecurity, can help to reduce the skill shortage faced by entire industry.

How much time do you commit for mentoring, do you need to set aside anytime for preparation and how you manage it with your other priorities?

Generally, I commit around 3–4 hours for mentoring in a month. Based on Mentees queries and requirements, I might have to research, which is part of my allocated self-learning time. Research might include talking to other experience Industry practitioners. Overall, it adds to my learning as well.

Did you help upscale your mentee’s softer skills and has it helped the mentee in her Cybersecurity Career?

I believe that I was able to help my mentee on the interpersonal skills. Being new to company, my mentee had self-doubts. She thought, she was not getting proper help and decent response from her senior colleagues, because she was not good at job. I explained the importance of human interaction and told her to catch up with them whenever they are around.

And she should have simple conversation with manager/senior colleagues, on some of the things she is going through. Seek their guidance on how she can improve and become an asset to the company and the team.

Last I heard from her, my advice has helped her little bit.

What advise you will give for aspiring mentors & mentees?

For Mentors- Please try to listen to your mentees attentively and just guide them in their journey. Let them choose their own path.

During the entire mentorship journey, we as a mentor also can learn lot of things. Especially new ideas, new trends and overall program can help us improve our listening skills.

For Mentees- Please ask questions to your mentors and it’s completely fine to ask any question. No question is a stupid question. In our professional or personal life if we don’t ask, we cannot learn.

Have you faced any challenges while mentoring and how you tackled it?

Due to the broad nature of security industry, many a times in our day jobs we have been asked to work upon the things completely different from our domain expertise.

The only way you can tackle such situation is to do some research on your own and then discuss internally or externally, if possible, with your networks who has had real experience in that specific domain.

On the same note during my ISC2 mentorship journey in 2021, I was asked by a mentee to guide and help her out on some of the topics around the incident response and what it takes to be a good SOC analyst. Personally, I don’t have much experience around this area, so I quickly reached out to some of my colleagues and friends who has had vast experience in SOC area. After gathering all the necessary and relevant information, I was able to help my mentee and provide her the appropriate guidance she was looking for.

What’s the minimum time frame (# days, Months, frequency) a mentee required to achieve the goals?

It all depends upon the goals what mentee would like to achieve out of the entire mentorship program.

I always advice my mentees to figure out the long term, mid-term, and short-term goals they would like to achieve from their entire professional career. Many a times if it’s not easy for mentees especially newcomers to have a clear long-term goal then I advise them to list down the things they think they would like to achieve in 6 months and 2-year timeframe. This entire exercise can help mentees to figure out on their own how much time they really need to invest.

Would you like to advise or recommend any Cybersecurity mentoring program which mentees should join?

I would advise all the mentees, based in Singapore to sign up for the ISC2 Singapore chapter mentorship program and we should be opening the registrations soon.

We received very positive feedback from all mentees and mentors, and they have benefited a lot out of this 6-month long mentorship program in 2021.

Below mentioned is the link where mentees can find out more details on what they can gain out of the program.

(ISC)2 Singapore Chapter — (ISC)2 SG Mentorship Program Interest Registration (isc2chapter.sg)

Should mentees prepare anything technical or take any basic courses before joining Cybersecurity mentoring program? If yes, please suggest some courses or links.

I believe that there is no need for mentees to prepare anything technical before joining any of the Cybersecurity mentorship program. Just try to set some goals in advance and have basic idea what they would like to gain out of the mentorship program and do share with your mentors in your first meeting.

Do you have any suggestions for mentees from non-technical backgrounds?

Please always keep an open mind and do spend some-time in networking with the help of any of the mentorship program. It will help you to go long way in your career.

If you were to choose other profession, what would it be and why?

I would have been a motivational speaker, where I would have had the chance to inspire thousands of people.