--- title: "A Short Mentorship Success Story: Finding the Right Path in IT" description: One of the most rewarding parts of mentoring people over the years has been hearing from someone long after our original conversations and discovering how their career turned out. Sometimes months go by, sometimes years, and occasionally someone reaches out… url: "https://www.cyberspaceinnovations.com/docs/a-short-mentorship-success-story-finding-the-right-path-in-it/" updated: "2026-10-19" category: General Guidance --- # A Short Mentorship Success Story: Finding the Right Path in IT One of the most rewarding parts of mentoring people over the years has been hearing from someone long after our original conversations and discovering how their career turned out. Sometimes months go by, sometimes years, and occasionally someone reaches out with a story that reminds me why I've spent so much time helping people figure out their professional lives. Those conversations mean quite a bit to me because I genuinely enjoy seeing people succeed, especially when their journey takes them somewhere they never originally expected. I want to share one of those stories because it illustrates something I've been telling people for years. **You don't have to follow the most popular career path in technology to build a successful and rewarding career.** Sometimes the best opportunity is something you haven't even considered yet, and finding it can make an enormous difference in your professional life. ## Everyone Wants to Get Into Cybersecurity If you've followed my writing for any length of time, you probably know that I have some strong opinions about how the cybersecurity industry markets itself to people looking for new careers. I've watched countless individuals become convinced that cybersecurity is the ultimate destination, often because someone promised them an exciting job, excellent money, and a relatively easy path into the industry. Unfortunately, the reality is considerably more complicated, and plenty of talented people overlook other excellent technology careers because they've been led to believe cybersecurity is where all the opportunities are. Don't misunderstand me, because cybersecurity is an important field with some genuinely interesting work. I've spent a substantial part of my career dealing with security myself, and I understand why people are attracted to it. But technology is an enormous industry, and there are plenty of rewarding careers involving systems engineering, networking, cloud infrastructure, development, operations, automation, and other specialties that don't necessarily have cybersecurity in their job titles. One of the things I try to accomplish through mentorship is helping people understand that bigger picture. Instead of automatically recommending a certification, training program, or whatever technology happens to be fashionable this month, I'd rather learn what someone enjoys doing, what they're naturally good at, and what kind of work might make them happy. After all, there's not much point in spending years chasing a career only to discover that you hate doing the actual job. And yes, you can make some damn good money in those other fields, too. Hahaha! ## Sometimes the Right Direction Isn't the Obvious One Years ago, I had the opportunity to mentor someone who was exploring their future in technology. Like many people, they were considering the cybersecurity direction, but our conversations eventually led toward another possibility: network engineering. It's a field that doesn't always receive the attention it deserves when everyone is busy talking about ethical hacking, penetration testing, and security operations centers. Networking is one of those areas of technology that can be incredibly rewarding for someone who enjoys understanding how systems communicate and how complicated environments fit together. You're dealing with switches, routers, firewalls, connectivity, troubleshooting, and infrastructure that businesses depend on every single day. Depending on the role, you might work with a small organization, enormous enterprise networks, datacenters, or infrastructure spread across multiple countries. It's also the kind of work where practical experience can become extremely valuable. Understanding a networking concept in a classroom is one thing, but figuring out why a critical connection isn't working or how to make a complicated environment more reliable is something else entirely. The deeper you get into the field, the more you discover how much there is to learn, and that can be a wonderful thing for someone who enjoys solving technical problems. I encouraged this individual to explore that direction, and what happened afterward was pretty remarkable. ## A Career That Turned Out Better Than Expected Eventually, I learned that this person had built a successful career working with network infrastructure for a major company. Their work involved firewalls, switches, and hands-on technical responsibilities in locations around the world. They were earning excellent compensation, receiving bonuses, continuing to develop their skills, and enjoying the kind of work they were doing. Now think about that for a moment. Here was someone who could have spent years pursuing a conventional cybersecurity path simply because that's what so many people were recommending. Instead, they discovered a different specialty that suited their interests and abilities, and they built something genuinely rewarding from it. What makes this story meaningful to me isn't just the money, although being well compensated for work you enjoy certainly doesn't hurt. It's the fact that they found a professional direction that worked for them. They weren't stuck chasing somebody else's definition of success, and they didn't need a particular job title to prove they'd made it in technology. I also want to make something clear about mentorship. I didn't build this person's career for them, and I certainly didn't do the hard work required to become successful in network engineering. They made their own decisions, developed their abilities, gained experience, and created those opportunities. My contribution was helping them consider a direction they might otherwise have overlooked, and sometimes that's exactly what a good mentor should do. ## Finding Your Own Definition of Success One thing I've learned from mentoring thousands of people is that professional success looks different for everyone. Some people love cybersecurity and want to spend their careers investigating threats, responding to incidents, or designing security programs. Others would be much happier managing infrastructure, writing software, building cloud environments, working with automation, or eventually leading teams and organizations. And that's perfectly fine! You don't have to justify your career choices to an industry influencer, follow somebody else's five-step roadmap, or collect certifications just because everyone on LinkedIn seems to be doing it. The objective is to build a career that gives you opportunities, financial stability, personal satisfaction, and room to continue growing. Technology careers also aren't isolated from one another. A network engineer needs to understand security, a security professional benefits from understanding systems and networking, and someone working with cloud infrastructure may eventually find themselves involved with automation and AI. These specialties overlap constantly, and the experience you gain in one area can create opportunities in another. That's especially important as artificial intelligence changes how organizations approach technology and business operations. I expect many people will discover opportunities by combining their existing knowledge with AI and automation rather than abandoning everything they've learned to chase an entirely new job title. The same principle applies: understand your strengths, explore the possibilities, and make decisions based on what you actually want to accomplish. ## What Mentorship Really Means to Me When people approach me about mentorship, I don't want to hand everyone the same career roadmap and send them on their way. That would certainly make my life easier, but it wouldn't be particularly useful to someone trying to make important decisions about their future. I'd much rather understand their background, interests, circumstances, and goals before discussing which directions might be worth exploring. Sometimes that means encouraging someone to pursue a technical specialty they've never considered. Other times it means suggesting they strengthen their foundations, rethink an expensive training program, or consider whether a leadership or business role might suit them better. And occasionally, it means telling someone that the career they've been chasing may not be the best fit for what they actually enjoy doing. Those aren't always the answers people expect to hear, but I believe good mentorship should be about helping someone make better decisions rather than simply telling them what they want to hear. The success story I shared here is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in that approach. Years later, hearing that someone has built a rewarding career is far more meaningful to me than knowing whether they followed a particular recommendation or earned a certain certification. The important part is that they found a direction that worked and did the work necessary to make something of it. ## One Last Thought If you're exploring a career in technology, I encourage you to look beyond the job titles everyone is talking about. Take some time to understand what different professionals actually do, what skills their jobs require, and whether you'd enjoy spending your days doing that kind of work. You might discover that the opportunity you're looking for has been sitting right in front of you all along. And if you're already established in technology but wondering what comes next, the same advice applies. Your experience may open doors into specialties, leadership positions, business opportunities, or emerging technologies that weren't available when you started your career. There's nothing wrong with changing direction when you discover something better suited to your interests and ambitions. One of the greatest rewards of mentoring is watching people discover possibilities they hadn't considered and then go on to build something wonderful for themselves. I don't need everyone I mentor to become a cybersecurity professional, an executive, or the next great AI engineer. I'd much rather see them doing work they enjoy, making a good living, and having enough freedom to build the life they want. That's a success story worth celebrating, no matter what the job title happens to be. Stay hungry for knowledge, my friends. Mahalo!