The energy sector has probably one of the biggest areas that you could bring to
the gen z of saying like you're bringing so much value to not just this
company, but honestly, to the end of the day, to the United
States when you come here and work with us. Welcome everyone to the Industrial
Security Podcast. My name is Nate Nelson. I'm here with Andrew Ginter,
the vice president of Industrial Security at Waterfall Security Solutions, who's going to introduce
the subject and guest of our show today. Andrew, how's it going.
I'm very well. Thank you, Nate. We have two guests today.
Amanda Thiel is the Workforce Development Group lead at Argone National Laboratory and Eddie Mullins
is the project coordinator at Argone National Laboratory. And they're going to be talking
about jobs. The official title here is Deep Mystifying Cyber Job. You know,
they're focused on the energy sector, but you know, it seems to
me that a lot of what they say applies to all industries, you know,
especially you know, since we're talking about jobs and recruiting, and you
know, people complain, the employers complain that nobody's applying to ot cybersecurity job
postings and the you know, the the people looking for jobs are complaining there
are no postings, they can't find them. So in a sense, both
of these are the same problem, and this is what Amanda and Eddie are
going to be talking to us about. All right, then, without further
Ado, here's your interview with Amanda and en Eddie. Hello, Amanda,
Hello Eddie, thank you for joining us. Before we get started, could
you, maybe, you know, give our listeners a few words about yourselves
and about the good work that you're doing on the the Cyberforce project at Argone
National Labs. Sure. I'm Amanda feel I'm the Workforce Development Group lead at
ARGON National Average Story and I lead the Cyberforce Program out of the Department of
Energies, Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response. And I'm Eddie
Mullins. I am the project coordinator at the Outgo National Laboratory and I work
closely with AMANDAI I assist in managing the Cyberforce program. And the Cyberforce Program
is the collegiate workforce development effort out of the Department of Energy that looks at
providing students that operational technology component of understanding how to get themselves into that energy
sector job right after they get out of college. Okay, so thanks for
that. So you know, in my understanding, Cyberforce is training you know,
young folk to enter the cybersecurity roles in the energy sector. And you
know you I heard you folks speak at at the energy set conference recently.
You've been running into challenges getting your graduates placed. Can you can you talk
about you know, some of these some of these challenges. What's what are
you running into here? Sure? So, the Cyberforce program hosts a handful
of competitions and exercises for collegiate students to kind of better prepare themselves with cybersecurity
skills and operational technology knowledge. But what we've come to really understand is that
the terminology that a lot of these students learn at school and their colleges,
universities, even in their quick programs that they take their boot camps, don't
necessarily translate into the jobs that they're looking at online. And what I mean
by that is that term anology that we would necessarily think in a traditional cybersecurity
or cyber engineer that they're looking for in a job doesn't necessarily translate directly in
a one to one, when we get into the energy sector, they use
slightly different terminology. And so these brand new people are students or folks that
are looking to go into the job market, they're not fully understanding that there's
a different vocabulary that's out there, and so trying to get them to really
understand that they have to be look fully into a job description as well as
understanding that their job role is not going to just be cyber when they get
into an energy sector job. Yeah. And also one of the other things
that that we notice, you know, is we looked at generation and the
way that the modern generation that's getting into the workforce now, the way they
look at the workforce is completely different than what if like a Gen X or
a baby boomer, you know, the millennials of the Gen z's, when
they're reading these job descriptions, there's a lot more than just the totality of
what it is that they're going to be doing that they're looking for is you
know, they're focusing so much on what is the general experience of and how
does this job and the experience that it's describing to me, how does it
fit into my life? You know, like our parents when they were in
the workforce, it was how do we fit to the workforce. Now it's
kind of like how does the workforce fit for us? So, you know,
we're seeing that some of these descriptions and the way that they're written in
the energy sector has been they've been utilized for, you know, quite some
time, and they're a little bit outdated to some of the modern tactics and
the modern ideals that you know, a current generation student would be looking for
and appealing to apply. Andrew seems to me that what you guys are talking
about here, it's a it's a common refrain, maybe within industrial security,
but also in just about any line of work. You know, you go
to school for all these years, you learn calculus, and then you get
out into the real world and you don't know how to do your taxes.
Is there anything unique about how we're applying this to industrial security this problem?
I don't think so. I mean, I think it's a it's a it's
a widespread problem. The specific data points that Amanda and Eddie have are are
in the energy sector. That's that's what they do. But yeah, I
see a lot of similarities across industries, you know, and it's it's not
just across industries, it's across uh you know time. I mean, I'm
coming up on the end of my career now, but I remember, you
know, before I started, when I graduated high school, I was going
to do a sciences degree at the University of Calgary. I show up at
the university and I know that to do a sciences degree you've got to take
first year calculus. And I had taken high school calculus. And the university
head of program saying, look, if you've taken high school calculus, you
can do a challenge exam. If you ace the challenge exam, you don't
have to do the first semester of university calculus. So you know, I'm
full of myself. I I say, you know, I got an I
got an A in high school calculus. I should be able to do this.
I show up for the challenge exam, and you know, they put
the exam paper down in front of me, and I don't understand even one
question. Your name goes here. I understood that part. The rest of
it, no idea, you know. Five minutes later, studying these questions,
I get up, I hand the paper and I leave. I show
up for the calculus course, you know, two lectures in I figure out
that they're teaching exactly the same thing that I learned in high school, only
they're using a different notation. And so I looked at these questions and didn't
understand and one of them so terminology notation, you know, this is stuff
that you know, there's there's gaps, you know in this industry, there's
gaps in other industries, there's gaps over time. This is I think this
is a very common problem. Okay, so you know that sounds like a
couple of different problems. Can we can we hit terminology first? Can you
give us some examples what what you know? What are the what are the
gaps that that students are seeing versus you know, the the industry is using
in a lot of positions, we'll say in the energy sector. They tend
to look a lot as in a generic post on either an operational security analyst
or operational security engineer. And when they look at those things, they tend
to think of it as operational meaning less on the cyber side, or it's
written more in a sense of it sounds like a help desk roll rather than
them actually working on the cyber side, and it tends to be we'll use
the word less flashy for them. So when we think through cyber, they're
looking for firewalls and they're looking for the fact that they're going to be building
a secure back end. And part of that problem is, and again it's
the knowledge that some of these students lack and just the general critical infrastructure field
is that energy sector specifically has been around for obviously so long that our infrastructure
has been there and it's not changing. So a lot of what we need
security wise is understanding both and a physical type as well as the IT that
goes with it. But it's not just cyber. It's having a multi hat
wearing person that understands both an IT infrastructure but also an operational infrastructure, which
is keeping the grid up and running. But we can't just keep the grid
up and running by updating and putting updates in place or a firewall, and
so they're looking for those things of I'm gonna be managing patching, keeping the
lights on for things, and it's not as clear as day for these students,
and so when they don't see that in a job posting or even a
job title, it tends to be less clear for them. If that's actually
what they're going to be doing or not. But when we talk to these
organizations, that's ultimately what they'd be doing on some portions of their job,
and other portions we'd need them to really kind of help understand what's the next
thing look like for this company, what's the next generation of energy look like?
In securing it? And part of that is still trying to figure out
how what are we calling things? What are we doing and working through some
of that. You also mentioned sort of generational challenges. It's one thing to
look at a job posting and say, yes, this is the kind of
thing I've been trained for, but it's it's another thing to look at it
and say this is what I've been trained for, and yes, this is
what I want to do. It sounded like you were saying that sort of
a lot of the postings that you see out there are sort of recycling language
from ten years ago and really are not appealing to the young people that you
know the posting is targeting. Can you talk about about that what you know,
what what needs to be in these postings and you know, is it
just the postings or does the nature of the job have to change somehow in
order to attract this generation of workers. Yeah, I think it's it's it's
a little bit of both both, not just the language within the posting,
and you know, also what is the experience that come with it? I
mean we all know, like after twenty twenty, you know, in the
modern generation, one of the biggest things that you know, they look for
is flexibility. You know, if you look at the Baby Boomers, the
gen X, like telecommuting never existed. It wasn't an expected expectation of work,
where now it's it's almost a demanded expectation of work. And it doesn't
have to do which is telecommuting or hybrid work. It's just the flexibility of
hours of scheduling. You know, we all we all grew up with the
standard nine to five that that's almost kind of going into the older generation where
it doesn't exist. Now, you know, the modern generation is looking to
be flexible on how it is that they can work, what hours do they
work best at, And those are some of the things that are simply to
add to a job description that can already emphasize what the job experience would be
like. You know, when they look at as soon as they start seeing
that nine to five. Yeah, like a man mentioned earlier, it just
it doesn't sound sexy. It's not appealing. And when you talk about the
energy sector automatically, when you think of energy, you think the line workers,
the boots on ground, where the sector in itself is already doesn't have
those appealing factors that would be working for a Google and Amazon, those big
tech companies. So that's how you modernize the positions and the descriptions to provide
a little bit of emphasis on the benefits of life. We all know that
working for the energy sector has its own benefits, and sometimes we the energy
sector kind of fails to emphasize those benefits of the consistency of work, those
kind of things. So it's a little bit of both when it comes to
just the terminology as well as the flexibility of what they're looking for. And
we want to say is we're not emphasizing that job posting should be unrealistic either.
At the end of the day, like we understand that there's always going
to be jobs that just there's not much you can change and a job posting
to make it sound any better. But when we start looking at the generational
differences between each generation and how potentially one looks similar to another, but then
what are their differences. You start to kind of notice, just in the
workforce alone, what does each generation really value. And at the end of
the day, we look at job postings and they tend to be written a
lot for the Baby Boomers, those that really they were wanting a job and
it really didn't I don't want say it didn't matter what the job was,
but they were very they wanted to get in the door. They preferred structured
organization at the end of the day, and so you see a lot of
positions written that way. When you look at the gen X, they started
to be more flexible in wanting to really be able to see the ability to
change as an opportunity grew, and so being able to be able to see
the edibility to grow within an organization started to occur. But then you get
to the Millennials, and again, as Eddie pointed out, when they started
to join the workforce, COVID hit shortly in the mix of it and work
from home started. But equally, Millennials tend to be very money driven.
So at the end of the day, when you do a job posting for
them, they're very much wanting to know what is the dollar range that they're
going to be hired within. I'm again not stating that that's a good or
a bad thing, but they kind of have an expectation up front of understanding
where their lifestyle is within their kind of domain. And then you see gen
Z, which is kind of on almost a polar opposite spectrum. Again not
saying that they're not interested in the dollar value, but they're really more interested
in understanding like how do they bring value to your company but also bring value
to their life. They want to make a difference, and that's a really
hard way that you need to think, how can I write our job description
to show someone the value that they bring to a bigger picture at the end
of the day, And honestly, the energy sector has probably one of the
biggest areas that you could bring to the gen Z of saying like you're bringing
so much value to not just this company, but honestly, to the end
of the day, to the United States when you come here and work with
us, and to Eddie's point, like energy brings stability when we think,
right, just this last year, you know, we've had a lot of
those big tech companies having quite a bit of layoffs, and so when you
think through energy sector companies the like, you know you have more stability there.
It may not be as flashy of a salary, but you have stability
and you have something that brings value back to you. I'm actually bringing power
electricity something back to either my own house or to people that I know.
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Waterfall Security site and click on white papers and ebooks. So I am a
millennial technically, but I'm only a few years off of gen Z, and
so I do feel the urge to defend them a bit here. I don't
think that what amandament is that gen Z is, you know, money hungry
or whatever it. Gen Z does put a focus on the salary numbers,
because I think that there's more of an idea of worker empowerment. You know
that you don't just go and work for a company and take whatever they give
you, but you you vet them to make sure that they're going to give
you the experience and the compensation that you deserve up front. That's right.
I mean, you know, I have a daughter who's who's a millennial,
and you know, I might use the word practical to me. You know,
it's it's not just saying I want to know how much money I'm going
to get. It's it's a bigger picture of and what does that mean for
my life? Where am I going to live. Do I have to drive
into work? You know what? How does how does it effect? You
know, sort of the big picture. And to me, it's, you
know, it's more than than the generation with each generation. To me,
you've also got to look at well bluntly, how old is the generation and
what are they up to in a current posting. I mean, it's you
know, to me, it's it's I see the mistake here. The mistake
is old guys like me put a job posting together that would appeal to me
when I was fresh out of school. Yeah, well, A, I'm
the wrong generation. B. I'm not fresh out of school. B.
You know, see a lot of these folks aren't fresh out of school either.
I remember, you know, when I was a young man, I
bounced from job to job. The grasp was always greener. And then I
had my first and the wife looks at me and says, you're done moving
around, And I'm going that's for sure. And I got me a job.
I settled down and I stayed there for fifteen years. Why Because I
had other fish to fry, Okay, I had I had other priorities in
life. I had other ways to spend my energy. If I had spare
energy, It went into the kids, it went into the home, it
went into the family, not you know, finding the grasses green our next
job. So you know, there's a lot of variables here. It's not
just a generation, but you know, where is that each generation at their
point in life in this kind of age group that you're trying to appeal to,
right, And of course the conditions in which people are looking for jobs
now are quite different. You know. I can imagine someone in say your
position, Andrew, who's been at the same company for fifteen years or longer
than that, and then they post a job for maybe the kind of entry
level job that they started off with, and they have a salary number associated
with it that sounds quite good to them. But of course houses cost a
lot more relative to average salaries these days than they did before, and so
it might seem like a lot to somebody of an older generation now to a
younger generation, you know, uh, doesn't quite go as far. Indeed,
So a lot of variables to take into account. So that makes sense.
But you know, I want to I want to push back on sort
of I heard you use the word remote work saying that you know, there's
a generation of young folks out there that entered the workforce, you know,
during or shortly before the pandemic, that have become accustomed to remote work.
Everyone's expecting remote work, you know. I have to push back on that.
If you are a pipe fitter in you know, a power plant and
it's your job to you know, fix stuff that's broken, and you carry
a tool kit around all day, this is not something you can do remotely.
You know. Is it really true that there's a whole generation of people
out there ex expecting to do remote work? And you know, to me,
that just doesn't seem possible. Can can you talk about that a bit
more sure so you know you're right? That's it's definitely I think more what
I think Eddie and I were mentioning was more definitely towards the tech field,
and I think it's a benefit of tech to be able to be remote.
Most jobs require you to have your computer and internet line, and you know,
you should be able off to the races. Most of us figured that
one out again, unfortunately during a time in which we didn't really have many
options but to be at home. Other than less, your job was to
be in the office, which again not stating that some of these energy companies
did require someone to still be in the office. But the a lot of
we'll say entry level are folks looking to come into the job market. They
grew up in what was a remote environment, whether that was school, whether
that was a remote job, and so they see flexibility into them almost a
negotiation factor of that ability to be able to work from home. And so
seeing the tech industry is one of those of the SEW and again, I
think everyone looks at that it could be a systemic problem moving forward, and
it could be a benefit dependent on where your organization is. That that is
definitely something that we've noticed that the younger generations look for and find as a
means of want is their ability to work from I won't even say work from
home, but work from wherever they're at. Some of them it's they want
to be on vacation three hundred and sixty five days a year, but work
from wherever that places. And some of them is they just really enjoy working
from home rather than being in an office. So they can work and you
know, be at home in Alaska, but work for you know, a
company on the East coast, whatever makes most sense for them in a comfort
environment. But I agree with you that no, not every industry and not
every person you know understands that that's something that you know is available to them.
I mean, it's kind of one of the appeals to come into the
tech industry. When you think you know the tech industry and you look at
California and states, you know, those those big states. Automatically, you
you assume two things, one flexibility and two you assume high salary. And
the flexibility, especially with Teleramote, is what will allow some companies to be
able to gain talent outside the scope of their their availability. You know,
if you look at rural Arkansas and you need a cyber operator in a rural
area, if you don't have that flexibility, you limit yourself on how far
can somebody be from the office. Are you gonna is somebody gonna be willing
to drive two hours to go into the office. Or if you allow the
tell a remote the hybrid option, you can get talent within outside the scope
of driving distance, which allows you to operate slightly more efficiently. So that's
that's that's that's what I was referring to when it comes to the flexibility in
the tech industry. That's kind of one of the benefits to it. On
this subject of remote work, I have some notion that there are jobs with
an industrial setting that that can be done remotely. You know, maybe a
work yet a sock. But don't you need most people to be on premises?
Like what percentage of people are we talking about here with regards to who
The short answer is it depends. There isn't an easy number that springs to
mind. You know some of the dimensions of the problem. One is criticality.
If we're talking about, you know, managing small wind farms or small
solar farms, a lot of that's done remotely. Why Well, because the
worst case if you get something, if you if you get something horribly wrong,
what's the worst that can happen? The turbine turns off, the power
stops coming out of three of your windmills. Does that affect the grid?
Not? Really? Is even affect your bottom line? Well, it depends
how big a utility you are. If you only have three windmills, it's
a big deal. If you have you know, seven hundred, nobody notices.
So on the other hand, you know, if you've got a large
power plant, that is you know, feeding hospitals, it's feeding the military
installations, it's you know, it's a really important asset. You've got I
don't know, a hydroelectric dam driving it, or you've got coal fired power
plant, you know, massive boilers and furnaces. There's more of a push
in the sort of the network engineering world to make that not so accessible remotely,
because all remote access is potentially a threat. It has to do with
the role as well. As you pointed out, there's a lot of you
know, if what you're doing is looking at stuff and drawing conclusions about it
and sending sort of abstract information back into into decision makers like your Your example
is a good one. The outsourced security operations center. These people generally don't
have they're not trained as incident responders. Okay, they don't log into the
system and start poking around it. They're not trained to touch the systems,
but they are trained to look at the alerts and you know, look at
circumstances and decide whether something merits a deeper investigation and then sort over the fence
with a lot of information to the incident response team. So the incident response
team might have to fly out to side, but you know, or might
be hosted at the site, but not necessarily the people doing the analysis.
So yeah, it's a long fancy way of saying it depends. Imagine though,
that we had a magic wand, and we waived the magic wand,
and all of a sudden, the job postings people were putting out. We're,
you know, speaking to the aspects of the job that appeal the most
to the you know, the current generation of entry level workers, and you
know, magically, you know, use the terminology that that resonated, you
know, with the entry level workers saying, yes, this is what I
was trained on, this is what I'm able to do if we fix those
problems. Are we done now? Unfortunately, I don't think so just yet.
What we've also tended to find, and again I'm not nitpicking on the
energy sector because I know that this is done in a lot of places,
but we've found that there's a use of I'll use the word conglomerate job postings.
So what I mean by that is, if I'm looking for a software
engineer, the job hosting will be posted as a software engineer one, two,
three or senior. And while that seems very open to anyone to apply,
the position itself is written for the senior level, So when you read
through a job description like that, it comes very unwelcoming to an entry level
person looking to apply. It doesn't provide a very clear understanding of are you
looking for multiple software engineers? Are you looking for one? Am I,
as an entry level person who's applying, going to be compared against potentially someone
who is a senior level? Am I going to even have the ability to
apply? And when you look at the job descriptions, a lot of the
preferred experience is pretty hefty upfront, because again it's written for a senior level.
And in talking to a lot of organizations, we've found that they do
these in essence because it's a budget and instead of writing out several positions,
they pick whatever their max budget may be, and the job postings are written
to whatever their highest level person they can hire, and then they have the
discretion to hire people below that. So it's slightly concerning because if I see
a software engineer senior and I'm an entry level person coming right out of college,
my first thought is not to think I'm going to try to sell myself
as a senior software engineer. And if I don't have contacts at that organization
to even begin to ask the questions of can I even apply for this?
Is it more than one position? Do you think that there's openings for others?
It leaves it to be very unopened and unwelcoming, even though at beginning
it looks like there's these four potential areas that could fill for me. The
other thing that we've noticed is that in these conglomerate positions sometimes just the lack
of ensuring that it's very clear and not just like grammatically looking that when we
copy paste and change experience levels suggestions that we're being very mindful that those change
are occurring. And just similarly looking at like a software engineer one, some
of the job postings we found were like they which to me would scream a
very close to entry level person. People were asking for like eighteen years of
work or eighteen months of work experience, which is, you know, a
year and a half. Otherwise they'd take an internship experience. But equally so,
then we need to make sure we're providing those opportunities out to people in
the meantime. Yeah, and one of the difficult things that you know,
we understand the budget limitations. But you know, a lot of these companies
when they're looking for succession planning, when you write a position and you have
multiple levels, then competitively, you would think that the company would take the
person with the highest level of experience, which is the least amount of training
necessary for the person to be able to come in do the job. Like
we always like to say, you know, plug and play, But every
time you look at the senior level, you have individuals with eighteen fifteen years
plus of experience, where in the closer years the baby boomer generation, you're
closer years to retirement. And what occurs is that when you have these positions
like that and all you continuously gain is high senior level members to your company,
which is good at that time, you negate to have the secession planning
because you're you're missing out on those entry level positions that are lacking the training
to get to senior level. So once you start having the large numbers of
retirements and people start to leave, you have no one in the bottom to
fill that position in the training. So what occurs is that as your seniors
start to leave, then you're starting to alter the positions to bring an entry
level but now you lack the senior experience to produce that training to eventually repeat
the cycles. So we noticed a lot that a lot of these these students,
because they automatically, like a man that was mentioned, they automatically presume
they're going to be competing against a senior coming off of college, even at
a high level of education, a master's or a PhD. As soon as
they say experience required, a lot of students look back and say, is
my education, my projects in school, any competitions, is that experience or
is experience mean days on the job And a lot of the times they have
some experience, but they sell themselves short knowing that I would possibly be competing
with somebody who's ten fifteen years plus. And companies lose a lot of modern
innovative talent because of the way these conglomerate positions are being written. All right,
so you know, thinking about this, let me ask you a hard
question. We're talking about people coming out of school or out of university into
entry level positions. But a lot of the people I mean, I go
to conferences, I talk to people. A lot of the people that I
talked to, a lot of people that I see in the OT security space.
They they did not come out of school into OT security. They came
out of school with you know, an engineering degree or you know, some
sort of technician certification. They worked five years and then looked around and said,
you know, let me take the next step. Let me, you
know, get some skills in a new field in addition to what I've been
doing for the last five years. Or they come out of it, you
know, they go to school for it or even it cybersecurity. They get
a few years experience, maybe at a help desk, maybe in a you
know, a security operations center, and then they start, you know,
stepping out of their their their sweet spot, getting some some extra training,
getting some extra experience, and moving into the OT security space. You know,
none of these are entry level people. They've they've all started somewhere else.
They have five years experience on of some kind, and now they're moving
into the OT space. Is there really such a thing as an entry level
OT job. That's a really good question. So it is one that's like
a definite one that's super hard to just jump right into, and you definitely
need the mixture of talent. I think, what, at least from my
point of view, and I would presume Eddie's as well. Is what we're
looking to push back. I think a bit on is wouldn't it be great
that instead of having and again I'm not pushing back on just energy sector.
I think this happens quite a bit is organizations look to have someone else pay
to build someone's skill set up and then say I'd love for you to come
work for us. But instead of harvesting that talent as young, fresh green
talent and saying we're going to build you and we want you to stay with
us. That provides a lot of people so much more hope that you have
actual interest in having them grow. And so whether or not I walking in
the doors fresh out of college, no one hundred percent anything about operational technology.
If you buddy me up with the right person in your organization, whether
that's an informal or formal apprenticeship, whether that's an informal formal buddy system internship,
at the end of the day, I'm going to be more loyal to
that company because they see value in me of putting forth at time and effort
to grow me for their organization and seeing the point of moving me through how
they want things to be done by the time five years comes around again.
I think people have happened to do it all the time. They transfer organizations,
they move whatnot. But you're starting to already start to see what you're
fixed in somewhat of your ways of how you see things done things in other
ways. And so we would love to shift the paradigm away from just saying,
well, operational technology is you know, Bob who's been doing it for
thirty something years. Sooner or later, Bob's going to want to retire,
and who are we going to look for his protege And at what point in
time do we start saying, instead of looking for the person that's been there
for the last fifteen years that kind of knows what Bob does when Bob goes
on vacation every once in a while, why don't we start looking at the
younger talent that is interested in helping and start getting them involved. They're interested
in wanting to know equally, they have a passion to understand how do these
things break? And so instead of just saying we don't have entry level if
that answer is fully true, which I agree with you to some aspect on
that operational technology side, you know, that's not something that we should be
comfortable with actually going out and being able to say, is that there's no
such thing as entry level because even five years of experience in an engineering program
or it and moving over and cross training to then move into OT technically,
you're still a novice. You're not you know, you don't know at all
yet. But we just don't want to call it entry because no one wants
to take five years of experience and say now you're an entry level again.
So that's my pushes, you know, hopefully that at some point, you
know, we work to really start bringing in some of the younger talent and
giving them that opportunity of using some of their very large brain capacities that they
have to think outside of the box of how can we really secure some of
our energy sector needs. Yeah, you know, we've all heard the saying
it's not always greener on the other side, and just like we're saying,
like when you have somebody who has five years in a previous organization, they
have a reference point and a standard of what it is that they want to
do and how they want to be treated when they're doing it. So when
you go from it, you have your five years of experience, you're technically
still kind of new now into the OT space and you realize this is not
for me, or I really like this, but I don't like the way
this company does it. That's when you start having large turnover rates and you
start having a lot of people who come in do a year, and then
they want to pursue a higher salary. So you spent one year training a
person, You made them a very good OT operator, thank you very much.
Now they went to another company to pursue another higher salary. Another experience
when you take somebody who's brand new and the only experience as they have is
a college dorm, and they're willing to learn because they just spent four years,
five years learning. They don't have a reference of what another job should
be. They don't have a reference of how this job should be. All
they know is what you teach them. And all they know is that I'm
here to learn it. So you'll get more time and more effort and experience
from this individual who's really brand new, green off of you know, the
academia side of the house. Who's to go and to take the time to
learn something than somebody who already can learn it quicker, but ultimately say this
is not for me. I'm going to go with this different path. So
that's why we're kind of pushing to for companies to take the chance with what
we'll call it is take the chance and understand that it can be learned,
it can be taught. It's about taking the time to put them with the
right mentorship and taking the effort to really get them to be what the company
needs. Cool. Well, you know this has been good. I've I've
learned stuff. You know, before we let you go, Well, let
me thank you first, thank you both for joining us. Before I let
you go? You know, can you can you sum up for us what
what should we take away from from these these these questions and you know what
what are what are next steps if if we if we want to use the
knowledge. I hope that again we were obviously speaking to energy sector, that's
who we work with the most. Is that you know, we really want
to be able to bring together those open job positions that we know energy sector
has and the amazing talent that we also bring from the Cyberforce program in the
collegiate space and even those that have graduated from the program that are still seeking
you know, new employment and be able to honestly marry the two bringing that
talent to the energy sector and be prepared. But how do we do that
so that both sides are happy at the end of the day that both understand
and are open to the ideas of what you know, each are looking for
and understanding really the expectations going forth, you know, in future you know,
people and work and things that we're doing. And then also really to
just understand just from generationally, and this is not just energy sector specific,
but all that you know, we really need to stop and take a look
at how are we you know, when we're trying to recruit and you know,
write our positions for the next talent that we're looking for. We really
need to think through like what are the generations that we're looking for interested in
and each you know, senior level position could be a very different group than
someone when you're looking for an entry level and we should be working to kind
of ensure we're being inclusive and writing our positions so it makes the most appropriate
sense to who we're writing it for. So other than that, you know,
we'd love for people too. We have the Cyberforce competition that's our main
program out of the Cyberforce that comes up here in November. We would love
for people to be able to participate. That's our Red Blue exercise with agic
students. If those are interested, they can reach out on our website and
that's Cyberforce dot Energy dot gov and we'd love to hear and see people there
as soon as possible. Andrew, that was your interview with Amanda and Eddie.
To you of any final thoughts to take us out today, Yeah,
I mean the big thing I got out of the interview was, you know,
concrete ideas for making job postings appealing to the generation that you're recruiting,
you know, for the stage of life that that generation is in. And
this is something you know, it sounds to me like we have to you
know, consult with our HR people. These are people who study people,
not you know, recycle a job posting that you know attracted us, the
old folk to the industry when we were that age many many decades ago.
More generally, you know, what I got was sort of a strong sense
of how important it is to hire young people. Succession planning, you know,
the energy industry has to think long term. A lot of industries have
to think long term. And I'm diverging a bit, but you know,
succession planning can be tricky. That's something that sort of deserves a whole episode
if if we can find a guest, but let me give you sort of
just a taste. I remember reading a report. This was some years ago.
It was a manufacturing company. They brought in a couple of young engineers
to replace, you know, a technician who'd been with the company for forty
odd years and was approaching retirement. And these engineers just couldn't seem to keep
up with the technician. They were together, they were they were less productive
than the technician was. Singly, so they brought in an expert in operations.
Analyst followed these people around for a couple of weeks, came back with
a report and said, here's what's happening. Every time one of these engineers,
anytime anybody goes to this technician and asks the question, this person reaches
behind his desk post on a clipboard with seventy nine graps of paper on it,
you know, some of them yellow with age, flips through, you
know, answers the question and goes back to work. Get that clipboard.
Copy it. These are your standard operating instructions. You can't afford to have
them hanging on a clipboard in one person's office. So, you know,
making things work succession wise is important. It's it can be difficult, and
you know, hiring young people fresh out of school can make them more loyal.
But you know, in my opinion, look, even if if people
jump around, you know, like I said, in the first ten years
of their of their career, you know, the grass is always greener.
They bring you know, people coming into an organization bring perspectives from outside the
organization. You know, if someone's leaving our business, we might be missed,
but we're probably hiring someone at that level in from another business. So,
you know, the energy industry has to think and does think sometimes as
an industry, not just as individual enterprises, and as an industry, you
know, we have to be about hiring and training and growing young people.
This is something the industry has to do. This is something that every utility
in the industry has to do. And here's some concrete advice to you know,
speed that process, especially for the entry level folk. Okay, well,
thank you to Amanda and Eddie for elucidating that point for us. And
Andrew, thank you as always for speaking with me. It's always a pleasure.
Thank you, Nate. This has been the Industrial Security Podcast from Waterfall.
Thanks to everyone out there listening