This International Women’s Day, we hosted a candid forum conversation with Emma Mackenzie, a cyber security operations analyst at Aberdeen Group. It was practical and honest on the day-to-day realities of cyber and why women’s networks still matter for getting women into the industry and keeping them there.

Emma’s route into cyber also cuts through the usual assumptions. Before joining Aberdeen, she worked as a hairdresser and make-up artist. Then Covid hit, salons shut, and the stability of self-employment disappeared. She found a cyber bootcamp, jumped in and got properly hooked.

There’s a neatness people like to impose on career journeys. As if we all move in straight lines, collecting the right experiences in the right order, until we reach the right destination. Emma’s story is less linear – and perhaps more realistic.

And that’s precisely why it’s useful. Because most careers in cyber are not linear, they’re built through curiosity, recalibration and community. Here are the five tips we took from the session that are worth stealing (and sharing!).

1) Prioritise by risk, not by volume or urgency

Cyber is relentless. Tickets stack up, requests arrive stamped urgent, and someone is always trying to squeeze a last-minute exception through the door.

A grounded principle from the conversation: urgency isn’t the same thing as risk. A request can be urgent for someone’s project plan and still be low priority for security. Your job is to separate the loud from the dangerous and to manage expectations without becoming the department of “no”.

Lead with risk, and you’re not being difficult. You’re being coherent.

2) Make “translation” one of your core skills

A lot of cyber work is analysis that only becomes valuable when you can communicate it well.

You need to explain technical issues in plain language. You also need to translate “security concerns” into something the business can weigh properly: impact, likelihood, trade-offs, options. And sometimes you have to translate the other way too, because not every technical team thinks in risk terms.

The people who progress fastest aren’t always the most technical in the room. They’re the ones who can make risk land with the people who hold the budget, own the systems, or sign off the exceptions.

3) Treat learning like part of the job

We talked about how learning and development happens in bursts. Sometimes you’ll go full hyper-focus on a topic while at other times you’ll do next to nothing because life is busy and your brain is tired. Both are normal.

Three practical tips that came up:

• Use what’s free: Microsoft Learn, Cisco Networking Academy, LinkedIn Learning, and training opportunities that surface via LinkedIn posts if you pay attention.
• Keep it targeted: when you hit a knowledge gap, a bite-sized course can unblock you faster than flailing for hours.
• Use events as learning: talks and conferences are more than just networking; hearing how others frame problems widens your thinking quickly.

And one boundary that matters more than people admit: if cyber starts bleeding into all your time, protect your ‘off-switch’. You can’t build a long career on adrenaline.

4) Use AI like a tool, especially for clarity and speed

AI came up in a refreshingly un-hyped way. Used well, it helps you:

• Simplify technical explanations for non-technical stakeholders
• Reframe risk so it’s easier to act on
• Break down concepts when you’re learning something new.

The smart instinct here is literacy: if your organisation is adopting AI quickly, you don’t need to build the fanciest agent, but you do need to understand enough to ask the right questions about security implications.

If you’re not using AI at all, you’ll feel behind. If you trust it blindly, you’ll create new problems. The sweet spot is confident, careful, and curious.

5) Don’t do cyber alone – women’s forums matter (and IWD still matters)

International Women’s Day can feel like it’s all hashtags and nice graphics until you remember why it exists: we’re not done yet.

In cyber and tech, representation still drops as seniority rises. Women enter the industry, but many don’t stay, or don’t progress, because sponsorship, visibility, and pathways thin out. Too often, women get invited to speak when the topic is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), not when the topic is the technical work that they’re already brilliant at.

That’s why communities like WiCyS (Women in CyberSecurity), Empowering Women to Lead and internal women’s forums matter as career infrastructure, as:

• Mentoring that turns into sponsorship
• Networks that get you the interview
• Spaces where you can compare notes and sanity-check what’s “normal”
• Support that keeps talented people in the room long enough to lead.

And the quietly radical part is the structure: you get scaffolding, so whether your progress is neat, messy, or somewhere in between, you’re not doing it alone.