We kick off the second year of the Best Advice Q&A series with Robert Mancuso, chief business officer at iLOQ North America. He shares the best advice he’s ever heard, offers tips for young security industry pros and names the person to whom you should always listen to push your career forward.
Security Sales & Integration: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Robert Mancuso: “Don’t just learn the rules. Understand why they exist.” The best advice I ever received was to always ask “why?” before asking “how?”
Anyone can follow a checklist or apply a patch but truly understanding the reasoning behind security controls, policies and frameworks makes you exponentially more effective. It transforms you from someone who executes tasks into someone who can think critically, adapt to new threats and build solutions that actually hold up under pressure.
SSI: What advice would you give to those looking to achieve success in the security industry?
Mancuso: Embrace failure as a teacher. Every misconfiguration, every incident, every red team exercise you get stumped by is a lesson. The people who grow fastest are the ones willing to fail publicly and learn loudly.
Invest in relationships. Security is a community. Attend conferences, join local groups, contribute to open source and be generous with your knowledge. Your network will open doors no resume ever could.
SSI: If you could point to one person and tell up-and-comers to listen to them, who would it be?
Mancuso: Honestly, I’m going to answer this question a little differently than you might expect — because I think the most important thing I can tell someone starting out is this: find YOUR person.
Every career is different. Every path into this industry is different. The mentor, leader or colleague who shaped my thinking may not be the right voice for you — and that’s okay. What matters is that you actively seek out someone whose experience you respect, whose integrity you trust and whose advice comes from real-world lessons, not just theory.
That person might be a supervisor who took a chance on you early in your career. It might be a seasoned veteran at your company who has seen it all. It might be an instructor, a coach or even someone you meet at a conference who just gets it in a way that resonates with you.
Click here to check out all entries in SSI’s Best Advice series!
