How Non-Techie Women Can Break Into Tech in 2020

It’s no secret that the tech field has shown significant growth over the last couple of years. Most people consider switching to a tech career because of the high salaries offered. According to a recent survey from Indeed, 89% of people who switch to tech jobs are doing it because of the high-paying job opportunities. Besides this, working in the tech industry allows you to be able to work remotely. Most tech jobs are future-proof professions, so learning these skills can provide you a spot in the future of work. 

That said, what’s the current career landscape for women in tech? Although there are great opportunities for women in the industry, a salary gap still exists. Beyond this, finding a work-life balance is a little more complicated for women than it is for men, and it may seem even harder for women with no tech skills. So what should women without tech experience do to land a career in tech? Let’s find out.

Identify Your Transferable Skills

The first thing you should do is to identify the career niche where you’d like to work. Most people dive into a tech career that they don’t enjoy only because of the salary. They’ll invest in bachelor’s degrees or bootcamps that don’t connect them with their interests. If you already have some non-technical skills, you could be able to apply them in a tech career setting.

Let’s say, for instance, that you have a bachelor’s degree in economics. You could enroll in a Data Science Bootcamp or get a bachelor’s degree in data science. Data science utilizes many of the same career skills, like analytics and statistical math. Those with a degree in marketing could take a short-term course on digital marketing and adapt their skills to be applicable in a tech field.

What Careers Are Available without a Computer Science Degree?

Although people may think that the only way to break into tech is through a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, women still have plenty of career opportunities without one. Here are some of the most in-demand tech careers for women without technical experience:

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is broad and covers a lot of ground in the tech industry. Digital marketers manage social media content, explore new strategies for hitting marketing goals, analyze data generated from social media, and deal with customer service operations. It’s a fundamental role in every modern company. 

According to a recent survey from the Digital Marketing Institute, women are, on average,  11% more proficient in digital marketing skills than men. However, there is a shortage of women in the digital marketing arena. 71.7% of employees in the digital marketing workforce are men. This is a challenge that women could face in the tech field. However, daring and challenging the system could create more female representation in the digital marketing industry. 

Project Management

Project Management involves managing projects from beginning to end. If you work as a project manager you’ll be in a leadership position and have the responsibility to make sure everybody is in the right place doing the right things. You’ll make sure everybody is performing well, working towards the project goals, and making sure they meet deadlines. Most importantly, you’ll facilitate communication for everybody on the team.

Sales

Sales is another great field where you could work in a tech company. Sales managers have good salaries and a dynamic job that few find boring. Sales managers could make up to $117,344 in a tech company according to TechRepublic. You must have good communication, performance management, and coaching skills. If you combine your sales talent with development skills you’ll be able to create amazing experiences for customers in websites such as adding a functional shopping cart to a website. 

Find a Tech Job through a Tech Bootcamp

Studying a new skill through a bachelor’s degree is great because it gives you some prestige when applying for job positions. However, universities don’t always have a focus on employment. 

Bootcamps, on the other hand, have a high employment rate because they often partner with companies to show them their most outstanding bootcamp graduates. They also have up-to-date curricula, which is something that not all universities do. That’s why many bootcamps have a money-back guarantee when you don’t find a job within six months. Women, in particular, have a higher employment rate when graduating from Coding Bootcamps according to a survey conducted by Career Karma. In this survey, women experimented 82.7% employment rate, which was higher than men’s who got an 80.6% employment rate.

Overcoming the Pay Gap

In the same SwitchUp survey, women reported lower salaries in comparison to men. This is a major challenge that most women in tech are facing right now. It’s no secret to anyone that the salary gap is real, but it doesn’t mean you can’t overcome it. Before applying to a job try to find out about the company’s gender culture. Today there are companies that are currently defeating the salary gap by implementing fair payment methods. 

When you are applying for a job position, make sure they’re honest with you about how they handle this pay gap. Today we have great resources to find out if a company’s working with a salary cap, and Glassdoor is one of the best. To overcome the pay gap make sure the company has already taken the Equal Pay Pledge on Glassdoor. 

You could also check the reviews in Glassdoor that other people have left about that specific company. If they have a good track record when it comes to salaries then you could consider it a good fit. Don’t be afraid of negotiating as well. Find out online what’s the average salary for that job and negotiate your salary so you’re not paid less than the standard amount.

Don’t Be Intimidated

Although you don’t have tech skills, this should not stop you from applying for a job in a tech company. So don’t feel intimidated from this fact. And you never know, you could transition your non-techie skills to a tech career. Sometimes you’ll even learn on the way, and you can see if tech skills like coding are for you.

Find the Right Help

You should know that you’re not alone. There are organizations that are here to help you find career advice as a woman in the tech industry. Some of those organizations are She Can Code, Girls Who Code, and MarketHER, which is for women who are trying to find career advice in the marketing field. 

• 1st place - full paid trip to Defcon,
• 2nd place - 6 month subscription to Escalate
• 3rd place - Raspberry Pi

Additional partners opened up their physical locations to host women on-site in Baltimore at Point 3 offices, College Park Maryland at Cybrary and in San Francisco at Synack. 

Beginners had the opportunity to practice their skills in our reverse engineering challenge while the advanced crowd were be able to venture through all the challenges the ESCALATE ecosystem has to offer!

Even though we crashed the system with over 1000 sign-ons at once, the event got going the competition was fierce. Marcelle Lee, WSC Chief of Competitions said "The #WomenUniteOverCTF event is so cool! I tore up all the #PCAP challenges but now I'm at reversing and my roll has definitely slowed lol!"

The amazing Nada provided tutorials for the challenges to assist those new to competitions and the platform, while representatives from the participating organizations discussed their mission and goals with everyone. 

As the event came to a close, Jaime Lightfoot was crowned the winner! She racked up over 1500 points to take home the 1st place prize of a free trip to Defcon. The ladies did an amazing job!

All in all the event was an amazing way for participants to get in and learn something new about hacking and cyber competitions. These type of events will continue to be a part of the Women's Society of Cyberjutsu programming as we love to play! Be on the look out for a few cyber competition workshops coming up! 

Abstract

The demand for cybersecurity jobs in the United States is growing at a rapid rate, but despite the high demand for cybersecurity professionals to fill these positions, females remain significantly underrepresented in the cybersecurity profession. The purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore the underrepresentation of females in the cybersecurity profession by examining the factors that contribute to the interest, hiring, development, advancement, and sustainability of females in this profession within the United States. The overarching research question asked, “why is there a disproportionately low representation of female workers in the U.S. cybersecurity industry?” This research question was answered by employing a multiple-case study approach that surveyed three distinct groups of individuals. Semistructured interviews were conducted with participants representing each of the three cases, and then within-case and cross-case analyses were utilized to generate themes from the data.

The study’s target population consisted of individuals that are affected by the gender disparity in the cybersecurity profession. The sample included individuals that accurately represented the three cases chosen to explore the phenomenon: (a) female cybersecurity professionals working in the field, (b) female cybersecurity students intending to pursue a career in cybersecurity, and (c) male and female hiring managers responsible for filling cybersecurity positions. Thematic analysis of the interview data was conducted both within the individual cases and across the cases to achieve an overall impression of the phenomenon. Five themes emerged from the data analysis, and these five themes demonstrated that (a) cybersecurity professionals’ confidence levels vary based on gender, (b) stereotypes and biases negatively impact females working in the cybersecurity profession, (c) marketing images and terminology associated with the cybersecurity profession are not gender inclusive, (d) early exposure to cybersecurity is key to increasing female interest in the profession, and (e) males hold the majority of gateway positions that influence entry into the cybersecurity profession. These findings can be used by scholars and practitioners to improve the recruitment, hiring, development, advancement, and retention of females in the cybersecurity profession in the United States.

This event culminated with a panel discussion by all previous speakers on how to stay resilient in the male dominated arena and how to build confidence when presenting.

Speakers included:

• Joyce Brocaglia, EWF @joyce_brocaglia
• Elena Elkina, WISP @el0chka
• Mari Galloway, WSC @marigalloway
• Andrea Little Limbago, Virtru @limbagoa
  
• Bobbie Stempfley, WSC @BobbieStempfley
• Cameron Over, WSC - Panel Moderator

Details of each presentation here

Short Video Clip here

The evening finished up with the Women in Leadership Reception which had a packed house!! It was refreshing to see so many women, minorities, and allies in the room supporting each organization as major announcements were made. WSC made the announcement of a new CEO, Mari Galloway, marking the first transition of leadership since 2012. We also welcomed our 6 #cyberjutsursactribe pass winners to the family and got to meet a few of the ladies!

By Wednesday, we were Amping up our AM with Katczy and friends! The breakfast, hosted at the amazing Thirsty Bear was included a build your own mimosa bar and various sweets and treats to get your day going. Great conversations were had and new friendships were born.

We concluded the week Thursday with an Introduction to Capture the Flag (CTF) hosted by SANS Institute. With over 40 women in attendance to play SANS Netwars, fun was had all around! Thanks Max and Cecilia!

Despite all the rain that San Francisco had through the week, I would say that RSAC was a success. Partnerships were created, sponsors joined the WSC family and we had an all around great time. Special thanks to the WSC volunteers that stepped in to help set up, chat with table visitors, and break down all the 'stuff' we had for the conference. WSC is built on the backs of volunteers and we wouldn't be where we are today. 

Mansi @mansimusa (WSC COO), Fiona (WSC AMBASSADOR), Susan @v33na (WSC DC LEAD), Liz @city4liz (WSC SOCAL LEAD), Merissa (WSC PARTNERSHIPS) and so many more, THANK YOU!! You make my job easier!

Last but certain not least, thanks to Vince Vong for coordinating and organizing logistics and scheduling and all things D&I related. This was made possible because of his desire help change the game. 

Materials from the seminar will be available soon so please check back!

~Mari, CEO

Bindner demonstrated common misconfiguration of U-Boot and strategies to harden embedded devices on Tuesday and Olsen spoke at several events throughout the week on the dangers of embedded devices as well as tactical threat intelligence. Before attending the Women’s Immersion Academy, Bindner worked as a technical researcher and Olsen was a real estate agent.

#Speaking at #RSAC was the highlight of my year! I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of my speaking engagements and I'm grateful for the people that participated in my talks and provided value with their sharing. Despite being new to the infosec industry, everyone was welcoming, kind and most of all embraced me as one of their own," said Olsen on her experience speaking at RSAC.

Today, Olsen is a Cyber Threat Intel Analyst for Fortune 500 financial services company, while Bindner is a Security Associate at Rapid7. WSC is pleased to partner with with SANS and the Women’s Immersion Academy initiative to increase gender diversity in cybersecurity by providing women with a passion and aptitude for cybersecurity the opportunity to learn in-demand cybersecurity skills, earn GIAC certifications, and start a career in cybersecurity. Women in the program are graduating, recently graduated, unemployed, or career changers.

Through this partnership, all women that are selected are granted a one year membership with Women's Society of Cyberjutsu. WSC membership allows women to build of community of supporters and find her #cyberjutsutribe. Members also get discounts on training, access to previous training recordings, access to the job and more.

Congrats ladies on your accomplishment! We look forward to hearing more from you. 

For more information on the SANS Women's Academy, please visit: https://www.sans.org/cybertalent/cybersecurity-career/womens-academy

See the ATTACHED FILE for more details on what the position and requirements are. Don't be discouraged when applying. We are looking for more women to be in the internship program. 

For questions, please reach out to GLOBAL_Cyber_Security_Training@sands.com

For whatever reason, cyber competitions have been on my mind. So, I thought that I should share my experience as well as provide a few resources to those on the fence about participating in these cyber competitions.

Cyber competitions are a great way to gain valuable hands-on experience in various areas of cybersecurity such as pentesting and digital forensics. There are various types of competition in a few different varieties: Challenge-based, where you answer questions/challenges to gain points; Attack-Defend, where you must defend your 'castle' while trying to attack others; and Wargames which are online CTF competitions.

My first competition was back in 2013 with Cyberjutsu Women at the Global Cyberlympics, a competition hosted world-wide by EC-Council. This competition is an online team-based competition consisting of 3 qualifying rounds (Forensics, Penetration Testing, and Computer Network Defense (CND)) and a final round (Capture the Flag) usually hosted at the annual HackHalted conference.

Going into this competition, I had no freaking clue what to expect or even how to begin. The team consisted of 6 women lead by Lisa Jiggetts, the founder, CEO, and head Cyber Ninja for Women's Society of Cyberjutsu. We went into a conference room and immediately started the first round. We weren't organized and none of us knew what was going on but we trekked through it, together.

See with this competition, you can only have one person logged into the scoring server which meant that this person either had to perform all the tasks for each round or we had to figure out a way to collaborate quickly and efficiently to get the points. Even though we started off scrambling, by the end of round 1 we had found our groove and started racking up the points. Mind you, Lisa was the SME of the group and she had to provide a lot of insight.

I was scared because I didn't want to fail but was relieved to know that we were a team. We advanced to the next round. By the end, we all walked out of the room a little bit smarter and with ideas to help with round 2.

Fast forward a few weeks, we made it past round 2 but not without a few bumps in the road. I think round 2 was harder than the 1st one and for good reason. EC-Council wanted to make sure that people knew what they were doing. We spent that Saturday afternoon moving through challenges and troubleshooting and praying we get enough points to advance to the finals. When we recieved news that we made it to the final competition, we were beyond ecstatic. We were the only all women team (All cyberjutsu competition teams are all women) to advance to the final competition. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the Final event due to work, but I learned a lot about myself and my love for this field. We all love a little challenge here and there. And, the prizes are definitely a motivator to participate in these types of games.

For me the Global Cyberlympics was the start of something great. Participating in and winning competitions gives you confidence in your skills and boosts your ego a little bit. Although, I haven't won a competition, I have participated in a few of them each year (both on a team and individually). They are a lot of fun. You learn a lot of things by doing them. If you are interested in participating in these games but don't know where to start, don't fret. There are numerous resources available to help you get your feet wet and prep for success. Some of my favorite individual games include SANS Netwars (paid), OverTheWire (free, online), and Enigma Group (free, online). These games force you to research topics and try new things, some of which can be used in the real-world depending on the job that you do. Some of these competitions are even at various conferences and are free to participate in.

So, get to it and start refining your skills!

For more information or to participate in team based competitions, join the WSC Competition Group at www.womenscyberjutsu.org

Additional links with good information:

ctftime.org - lists competitions going on around the world and you can join teams

Capture the Flag Competitions - Basic info on CTF's as well as different ones for each type

 I wish I had this book when I first started my career.  It discusses the way that women shoot themselves in the foot and don't get what they want.  The book won't tell you how to negotiate a better salary, but it might show you the things you are doing that cause our own failures. 

Happy holidays!

I just found out that WSC is one of many good causes that you can donate to by shopping through smile.amazon.com.  If you shop Amazon, I hope you'll consider shopping through their smile.amazon.com portal and donate to the charity of your choice. 

For more information about the smile.amazon.com program, visit the about page at https://smile.amazon.com/about.

Imagine a situation where a denial of service event occurred, but this was detected by the customer realizing that there site was responding as expected.  For security teams, having the customer tell you there is an incident typically means the SOC missed something they should have seen.  I was brought in to take a look at the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tool and see what was available leading up to the event.  Ultimately, I didn't find much to indicate a denial of service, that doesn't mean there was nothing there, it just means I didn't see anything obvious.  Next up, I start working with the networking and security engineers.  I need to understand how traffic flowed, what devices would have inspected the traffic, and what could possibly tell me something happened.  This is where understanding networking and how routers, switches, firewalls and IDS tools work.  I realized that there were a few devices that had security controls on them, whether it was the intrusion detection sensor, the router, or the firewall.  I then had to work with the team to decipher the configurations, make sure that traffic was moving to security tools that could have caught the attack, make sure that the right policies were in place to detect the attack, and make sure that logging levels were appropriate.

Ultimately, if you plan to work on the defensive/detection side of security, it's vital to have a broad knowledge set.  My knowledge of networking and a variety of security tools give me instant credibility in the room.  The best security people for defense/detect are those that understand how things work, but also how things should work together.  You don't have to be able to configure the router, but understanding how it will handle traffic will be helpful.  Defense/detect roles are challenging because the wide breadth of knowledge you'll need, but it's also a great starting point to security specializations, like reverse engineering, forensics, or security engineering. 

If you haven't been to B-Sides, it's a fun local event that is relatively inexpensive.  I hope to see you there. (Link for B-Sides DC).  It's a great way to get CPE credits for your CISSP, and also a great time to network and socialize with security geeks.

However, I found that Microsoft has created a free training site, the Microsoft Virtual Academy (http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/).  I was really surprised to see how much material they had available all for free.  Also, it wasn't just Microsoft specific stuff, but also general topics around networking, security and programming.  

If you need training, this is definitely an offering that I would check out, especially given it's free price.