OWASP Global AppSec Lisbon 2024

Employees, especially those earlier in their career, often expect their managers to provide a plan for their career growth. Experienced managers know this effort needs to be collaborative or it will likely fall flat. Employees that take an active role in this process will have more agency in shaping their career.


This talk is designed to be valuable for both individual contributors (ICs) and people managers.

In this presentation we’ll demonstrate how to translate your company’s ladder into the skeleton of a Career Development Plan (CDP). A custom CDP is a powerful tool that can help you during promotions and makes filling out those dreaded self-reviews easy. It’s also a durable document that will help protect you from career setbacks when you switch teams, your manager leaves, or even when you change companies.


Another aspect of shaping your career is being comfortable talking about your accomplishments. Unfortunately a lot of security folks are bad at marketing. We’ll briefly cover how to make your work visible to others.


This combined with a CDP helps you achieve whatever’s next. This could be Senior to Staff AppSec Eng, IC to manager, or changing disciplines from CloudSec to CorpSec.


The most consistent person in your career is you, make sure you are recognized for your work.