What's your job about?
I work as a trainer and assessor with GOTAFE where I oversee the Certificate IV in Cyber Security qualification.
This requires overseeing the development of the course content and assessments and allows me to blend my passion for working within Cyber Security, and my other passion of teaching new students the prerequisite skills necessary to get into the industry.
On any given day I could be delivering content a group of students about how to perform a phishing, social engineering, or man in the middle attack, because understanding how hackers carry out these kinds of attacks, helps us to be better prepared for them.
If the last 24 months have taught us anything, it’s that given a crisis, that cybercriminals will attempt to exploit it, and we have seen a rise in all sorts of cyber-attacks, because according to the Australian Government we are well short of trained professionals to help combat the advanced attacks we are seeing, due to situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.
I never let a chance pass me by to learn, whether that is as a student, or as a trainer, and am always experimenting by building new assessments and labs for our students to tackle.
We’re bombarded by images in the media about hackers that are unethical, and I believe what I do is help change that narrative of hackers only being malicious.
What's your background?
I was born and raised in the Shepparton/Mooroopna area and grew up as a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri peoples.
When I was young, I went to Wilmot Rd Primary School. Whilst here my principal would take our maths class and would always ask “What planet are we on today, Mr Cranage?”. It sounds harsh I know but was in fact from a place of affection. Little did I know that he and my grandpa were close friends, and he often confided in my grandpa that he expected big things from me.
It was during these primary school years that my mum bought me my first computer, a Commodore 16, which was the budget version of Commodore computers at the time. The moment I plugged it in I was hooked. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I’d found something special.
After high school, I spent time about 8 years working for Telstra, which opened my eyes to what I could achieve if I set my mind to it. It was during this time I started building PC’s and really delving into IT.
After I decided that enough was enough at Telstra, I decided it was time for a change of careers. Little did I know I would spend several years writing code in Visual Basic 6, and Visual Basic for Apps.
Coding started a passion to actually reverse engineer code, to try and understand how assembly (a low-level machine programming language) worked
I also spent time working as a system’s administrator for the Rumbalara Medical Clinic. Little did I know that these years would be what would set the stage for me to be where I am today.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
No, not everyone can do my job, because you need years of industry experience to become a trainer and assessor. That said though I believe that anyone can work in cyber security if they want to put the effort in, love solving technical problems, and are a good people person.
Where I have used my years of knowledge to become a trainer and assessor, other people might want to become an incident responder or a penetration tester.
There are so many areas of expertise within cyber security, I would suggest looking at the NICE framework and exploring what jobs are available.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
There are many cool things about my job, like being able to issue a course award after 12 months of hard work put in by a student.
Recently I had the opportunity to coach a bunch of students as they took on the WorldSkills Australia competition, and it meant putting in a lot of unpaid hours, that often finished late, but the reward of seeing them compete against the biggest registered training organisations in Australia, that have 10 times the numbers of students that we do, and not only compete but managed to upset many of them.
What are the limitations of your job?
Well with every amazing job, there are always things that are less than fun. I often work a lot of late nights, and weekends, because that is what it takes to get all the tough stuff done. Like developing resources that are designed to improve the experience of the course for the students, or just being able to all the marking of assessments done.
3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...
3 pieces of advice I would give myself when I was a student would be, don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know, but I would like to know...”, be curious, and last is take a moment every now and then to appreciate what you have overcome so far.