NEW COHOST JASON DION

Kip Boyle: 

Hi, this is your Cyber Path. We’re the podcast that helps you get your dream cybersecurity job. I’m Kip Boyle and I’m an experienced hiring manager of cybersecurity professionals. Now for the past year, my good friend Wes Shriner has been my cohost. Maybe you’ve seen some episodes with Wes, he’s an amazing hiring manager. He’s really my mentor when it comes to hiring, because I think he just comes at it from a very relationship building perspective. I think he’s fantastic at it.

Well, so while we’ve created some great episodes together, and I hope you’ve learned a lot from Wes and myself together, Wes is super busy these days. He got himself a new role as a Chief Information Security Officer, and I couldn’t be happier for him. Unfortunately, the downside of that is that he’s not available to be my co-host anymore. He’s too dang busy doing Cisco stuff, so he’s graduated. I think of him as a graduate of my school of co-hosting.

And so I’ve invited a new co-host, his name is Jason Dion, and some of you may already be familiar with Jason from his online certification prep courses, and maybe you’re even already a customer of his. And so what I learned about Jason from working with him over the last six months, and now I’ll tell you more about that in a little bit, Jason and I will share, but he’s much more than a certification expert, it turns out he’s also an experienced hiring manager. Some of you may not know that, but he’s the co-host now and so let’s meet Jason.

So Jason, welcome. I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about yourself with respect to being a hiring manager?

Jason Dion: 

Yeah, it’s great to be here and I’m happy to be co-hosting the show with you now as we move forward. As Kip said, my name is Jason Dion and I am in the certification business now, but for the last 20 years I spent a lot of time in the military, government, and defense contracting world, in and around that space. And so I have quite a bit of experience in that area, especially doing some government hiring and things of that nature. And that’s where I’ve done a lot of my expertise inside of military hiring and government hiring practices.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah. And much more recent. Like I was in the military, but I haven’t been in that world for gosh, 20 years or something like that. So I love that you’re bringing a much more recent knowledge and experience base and I think that’s fantastic. I think that’s going to be super complementary because most of my hiring and team building experience is in private industry, and so I think by joining forces, I think we’re going to be able to bring a much wider breadth of knowledge to our audience.

Jason Dion:

Oh, most definitely. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that you and I started talking six months ago was because I have a lot of experience on the defense, government, and contracting side and military side, but I don’t have a lot of experience in the commercial industry, financial sectors, and things like that, that you’ve been doing the last 20 years. So I really see that you and I both have kind of the ying and yang and we kind of have opposites that work together.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah, and we both like teaching, so you’ve been a college professor, right?

Jason Dion: 

Yeah. So back in 2013, I decided that I wanted to start teaching, and so I got a job at the local community college teaching A+, Network+, and Security+, and that was kind of my foot in the door of becoming a college professor. And then from there, I started working at the bachelor’s level and then at the master’s level, all inside of the cybersecurity space as we were teaching different certification courses or just different courses in that realm. And it’s been a great experience, and it was a lot of fun, and that kind of led me into online teaching, which then morphed into my own company.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah. And that’s … I got to tell you, when you first kind of gave me a little bit of a peek into what you’ve been able to accomplish at Dion Training, the numbers of students you’ve been able to help, and the successes that you’ve had with them, I was super impressed. I’m still super impressed. I think it’s fantastic that we can join forces and that we can help people.

And so just real quick, Jason and I have gotten together and we created this service called Hired in 21 Days. It’s an online course and Hired in 21 Days kind of implies that you’re going to get a job in 21 days, but that’s not exactly it. What you’re going to get is in 21 days of lessons, daily lessons, you’re going to learn all of the secrets that we have to share with you about how hiring managers actually hire people. And if you can get into our head, then we think that’s going to position you for a lot of success.

Yeah, so Hiredin21Days.com is Jason’s new joint venture with me. We’re really excited about it, but let’s talk about what this means for the podcast, because with a new cohost and with a new course, online course that Jason and I are doing together, it gave us an opportunity to start to think about what should your cyber path, as a podcast, what should it be like going forward? Because hey, it could be anything that we want it to be, and so let’s talk about that so that you’ll know what to expect.

So we’re going to innovate, we’re going to try some new things, we’re going to build a brand new website, but at the center of this, right? Is we want to serve you. So we invite you to give us any feedback that you’d like to give us on how you think the podcast should be going forward. What should we cover? We certainly have some preliminary ideas about what we’re going to cover. Jason, why don’t you share what we think is going to happen here in the next several episodes?

Jason Dion: 

Yeah, I think just like you said, we’re going to be innovating and I’m a big fan of try new things, go fast, and break things, so hopefully I don’t break your podcast, but I am one that I like to try new things and see what works and see what resonates with the audience and with our students. And so when we started thinking about what can we cover inside of this podcast, I’ve listened to your podcast for about a year now.

Kip Boyle: 

Thank you.

Jason Dion: 

So I’ve listened to you all 54 ish episodes that we have, and you guys have spent a lot of time talking specifically about careers and about the different positions and about the hiring process. And I think all of that is good, and we’re going to still do a lot of that, obviously. We’re going to be talking all about careers, but we’re also going to talk about certifications. We’re going to talk about security clearances. Because again, I kind of bring that background with me from the defense and the military and the government side. We’re going to talk about education. What is the importance of college degrees inside the hiring process? For instance.

We’re going to talk about lots of other things that may be relevant to the listener’s life as an aspiring cybersecurity professional. And it’s going to be more than just this is a job and this is a position, but we really want to help you answer any of these questions you may have. What does an average day look like as a CSIO, for instance. Or as a cybersecurity analyst? Or things like that? I think it’s something that we can really help people who are aspiring to become cybersecurity professionals, or people who are already working in cybersecurity and trying to figure out what the next step is.

Kip Boyle:

Right, those who want to move up in the career ladder. Although I have to warn you, if you don’t already know this, that there is no one career ladder for cybersecurity.

Jason Dion: 

Yeah.

Kip Boyle: 

It’s more like a plate of spaghetti, so you have to kind of feel your way along, but that’s all right, we’re going to talk about that stuff. And I mentioned a moment ago, but let me just be clear, it used to be that yourcyberpath.com was really a place where I was hosting the online course that I had to offer in the past, because I really … After years and years and years of people tugging my elbow and saying, “Hey, I want to get into cybersecurity. How do I do that?” And me only being able to give off the cuff answers, I finally said, “I want to get serious about this. I really want to serve people and I want to give them better than just off the cuff answers.”

And that kind of was the genesis for Your Cyber Path as an online course and as a podcast. But now that I’ve shut that down, and now we’re doing Hired in 21 Days. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to recast yourcyberpath.com as the podcast for … Or sorry, as the website for this podcast, and we’ve gone out there and we’ve looked at what other folks are doing who have podcasts, and quite frankly, we’re going to rip off the best stuff that we saw. So I really think you’re going to enjoy the new version of yourcyberpath.com. Jason, tell them just a little bit about what they could expect to find there when we get that going.

Jason Dion: 

Yeah, so as we started doing our research and development, or our R and D, or rip off and duplicate, we started seeing that a lot of things that a lot of successful podcasts have that are helpful to the audience, right? Things like making sure that we have episode notes for each episode, so you have a place that you’ll be able to go and it will be something like yourcyberpath.com/the episode number. And so for instance, this episode happens to be episode 54, so if you go to yourcyberpath.com/54, you’re going to see a small summary of this episode with the episode notes.

The other thing we’ll have in there is full transcripts. We’ll have the ability for you to watch the video or listen to the podcast on the site itself, as well as links to anything that we happen to mention. So if we start talking about hey, there’s this great course that you need to check out or this new book, we’ll make sure there’s links for that. So everything makes it very easy for you to get everything in one place. And again, as Kip said, we’re doing this to help build you up as an audience and figure out what it is you need. So we’re going to continually take feedback and add things there as we keep growing it over time.

Kip Boyle: 

Yeah, absolutely. So again, if you have any feedback or any ideas for … Maybe you have a favorite other podcast and you love their website and you love the way they do things, we’d love to hear about that. So feel free to share that with us as well. And yeah, so we didn’t want to make a huge long episode today, we just wanted to take an opportunity to interview you, introduce you to Jason, talk about the future plans of this podcast, and so I think it’s time to wrap it up. Any final words, Jason?

Jason Dion: 

Yeah. I am just really happy to be here and I’m excited to see where the podcast goes in this season two of the podcast as we keep moving forward and building it and doing better things.

Kip Boyle: 

Great. That’s exactly where my head is as well. And so as we close out the episode, I want to tell you about a free quiz that you can take. If you like what we’re doing on the podcast, I think you’re going to like this quiz. It’s a very simple survey, it’s totally free, and we created it to help you identify exactly where you might be getting filtered out in the hiring process. And so it could be your resume isn’t quite right, it could be that your interviewing skills aren’t quite on point, or maybe your negotiation skills where you’re asking for too much money, or believe it or not, you may not be asking for enough money.

It’s hard to tell, but as hiring managers, that’s something that we’re going to share with you. It might have to do with the number of certifications you have or which college degree you have. Whatever it is, we’re going to help you identify it. So go to the free quiz. If you just go to www.hiredin21days.com, you can take that free quiz and get some information, which I think is going to help you land that job that you want. And let’s close with this, as I always say, you’re just one path away from your dream cybersecurity job. We’ll see you next time.