2023 NEW ZEALAND WOMEN IN SECURITY AWARDS

9 TH NOVEMBER Don’t Miss Out

Victoria Allee

Founder at LT Strategic Consulting; Director of Security for Corporate Intelligence and Insider Threat at Lam Research

As a teenage migrant to the US from the former Soviet Union with very little English, two family bags and not one friend to lean on in what was then a foreign land, I instinctively learnt early that survival and success required perseverance, hard work and a ton of grit. So I went to school, took simultaneous English classes and did homework with a dictionary in hand. Those teenage years sucked, very much. But they were a necessary evil to teach me that, if I wanted to achieve something, it was on me to do it. I do not believe life is here to hand me favours and I consider myself lucky to live in a place where opportunity exists.

I was determined to succeed in whatever I did and ended up in a security career by chance. I was not sure what I would do with my undergraduate double major. Then, one day I looked at my chosen coursework and had an epiphany. I realised 95 percent of my classes had something to do with security matters: military intelligence, geopolitics, conflict resolution, counterintelligence and the like, probably as a result of my life journey. That was when I knew security to be my passion. With that clarity I entered graduate school choosing to major in international security and looking for a way to serve the country that had given me the opportunity to make something of myself.

I joined the United States Intelligence Community where I worked for the next decade and a half. In my time with the US Government I put the mission first but never lost focus on my wider goals: to grow, to never stop learning and to influence others. I worked very hard to establish myself in my career. I took on difficult assignments. I was not satisfied sitting in a cushy medium-sized office and going home at five o’clock. I wanted, and needed, more. I always asked for temporary duty assignments in other domestic and overseas offices and positioned myself to work extensively outside my agency and build crossagency rapport.

All these steps proved worthwhile. In my government career I worked in three different field offices as well as headquarters, led responses to multiple terrorist events across the globe, represented the US government in more than 30 countries and personally trained investigators and analysts across several continents. When I resigned I was an executive responsible for intelligence activities and personnel across Africa, Americas, Europe and the Middle East.

LIFELONG LEARNING: A CAREER STRATEGY

My decision to leave the government was not the result of a mid-life crisis but rather part of my strategic long-term plan. I believed everyone should lean in as they set their goals, so I sought to broaden my experience into the wider security arena. That required me to move outside my crisis management, incident response and physical security comfort zones. It required a step into the unfamiliar: cybersecurity. I accepted a job with a cybersecurity company as an executive advisor, despite never having worked in cybersecurity.

My experience making this transition serves as the main lesson I share with my mentees, particularly with women who want to enter security. “Think outside the box. Look at the skillset you have and learn (which is also a skillset) how to reshape that experience into what you seek,” I tell them.

I was in the same position when I decided I needed to gain ground in cybersecurity. I had no technical certifications and no direct cyber experience, but I had what I quickly realised were skills that filled a gap for a lot of companies with a security workforce: global leadership skills, strategic initiative ability, business acumen, collaboration skills and strong written and oral communication skills.

The rest is history. Through my leadership and soft skill abilities the private sector saw me as someone who their clientele could relate to and as someone who could be put in front of a C-suite member and translate the complex speech surrounding cybersecurity.

Create What Does Not Exist

However, at this juncture I was missing a piece: the passion we all want when we wake up every day, the thing that drives us to show up, to do our best, to be our best. So, believing in myself, I started my own consulting firm. In 2021 I founded LT Strategic Consulting focused on non-cyber security matters: business strategic planning, risk assessments, global threat reports, analytical support and the like.

The move gave me the best of both worlds. I enjoyed educating my clients—companies large and small— on how to identify their cyber risk appetite and how to help their businesses work with security. Meanwhile, creating my own company served as an avenue for all things outside of cybersecurity that I held dear. It filled the ‘mission-void’ that came after leaving government service.

Coming Full Circle

Having gained cybersecurity expertise I took on a new challenge that became my dream career allowing me to pool everything I had learnt across my almost 20 years in security and use every aspect of it in one role.

I am now Director of Security at Lam Research, a global company in the semiconductor industry, where I am responsible for building out enterprise-wide corporate intelligence and insider threat programs. I feel greatly honoured to be in these shoes. I get to combine in one role everything I know within the security umbrella: counterintelligence, behaviour analytics, intelligence analysis, cybersecurity and, most importantly, leading and managing people. My gratitude for being given this opportunity to continue my passion post-government is very deep. But most importantly, it is proof that you can do what you love. You can combine multiple skillsets into one great career, and you can (and will) succeed post-government service. I hope my experiences dissipate the fear in others that arises when leaving government service.

www.linkedin.com/in/victoriav3