Mentors can help guide your on your cyber career journey. Here's some advice about creating and nurturing those relationships.

Find supporters

• Find people who genuinely care about your development.
• Think about building our own personal “Board of Directors.”
  • In a cyber career, this could include people who have taken a wide variety of paths through the field.

Be thoughtful

• Think about how your relationship can benefit them, not just you.
• See where your interests overlap, ask if they need help with anything, and occasionally offer small gestures of reciprocation.
• In the cyber field, things change every day. One way to make that part of your mentorships is to spend your time and energy on something that interests them (and, ideally, you too). One way to do that is:
  • ask what topics or questions currently interest your mentor,
  • ask where they’ve already looked for answers,
  • spend some time researching the same thing, or just make a note of it and keep an eye out for news/trends on that topic,
  • send your mentor the most relevant link you found, or a short synopsis of what you reviewed.

Mentor others too!

• It’s okay to mentor others even if you’re new to the field. You can focus on helping those whose progression is even just a bit behind your own.
• If there’s no one in particular asking you for help, you can just imagine what you wish you’d known a couple months or years ago. Create helpful content to help people in that position.
• Teaching is a great way to cement your knowledge and build community!