When did you first consider working in digital Identity and how did it happen?
My name is Emilie, and I am a consultant in the Digital Identity practice of Deloitte Netherlands.
Rolling into the field of digital Identity was a happy accident.
The first time I considered working in Identity & Access Management was the grey windy evening of Thursday 1st of October 2020. I remember feeling disappointed.
A recruiter had just turned down my application for my dream job: a working student position in data privacy. Having a background in Law and a fervent fascination for business and technology, data privacy seemed like a comfortable and plushy start for my career. Especially at a world class institution like Deloitte. I remember picturing how proud my family would be.
Those hopes got slashed however, when my application got turned down. Instead, the recruiter sent me a link that contained the mysterious letter combination “IAM”, one I had never heard before. It was a vacancy for an Identity & Access Management consultant position in the same firm. So, I did what most of us do when we face the unknown, I turned to Google.
The Google results were confusing. My first encounter with IAM involved a lot of daunting IT diagrams, techies on YouTube, and mystical sales pitches for cold-sounding software vendors. Not the warmest of introductions. I was discouraged, but part of me was intrigued.
I decided in that moment to focus on what I knew instead of what I didn’t, and to trust the process that I would figure it out. From that point onwards, my knowledge of data privacy became my anchor and my safety vest.
In a Eureka-like moment, with papers and post-it notes furiously sprawled all over my bedroom corner desk, something clicked. I thought of Identity through the lens of data privacy. How can individuals be protected and given rights in cyberspace when it is not traceable where these individuals begin and where they end? The idea of blowing humanity into the bits and bytes that form our online presence struck a chord with me. This vision formed my north star throughout my job interview and my first working months.
Since then, Deloitte’s Identity team and I have come a long way. At the time, I filled Deloitte Netherland’s first pure sang identity vacancy. Since then, both our team and revenue have doubled, and we are growing at high speed.
The rich training materials and client engagements at Deloitte have provided me with a grounded understanding of digital identity and cybersecurity.
Looking back, I have picked-up on three main takeaways during my journey so far:
- Sometimes you just need the guts to jump into the unknown and trust your ability to figure things out as you go
- Digital Identity forms the beating heart of any IT security system. Its veins channel deeply throughout the entire digital structure of any organization. Getting digital identity right is not an ‘add-on’, it’s a foundation
- Walking the road less traveled can be very rewarding. Before you know it, you could be trailblazing on a motorway in the making.