My Path to Progression: Account Manager to Security Consultant

Through our Path to Progression blog series, we’re sharing colleague stories about how individuals have developed, changed and grown their career within NCC Group.

In today's blog post, we spoke to Kane Drinkwater to hear more about how he made the move from an Account Manager to becoming a Security Consultant.

What was your first role with NCC Group? 

I joined NCC Group as an Account Manager in August 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. I really liked the role and learned a lot. I had been working in sales roles for a decade already having started my first sales job straight after leaving University. Being an Account Manager was an interesting job, as it is a very dynamic sector, and no two days are the same.

What is your current role? 

I currently work as a Security Consultant for our Risk Management and Governance (RM&G) division. I deliver NCC Group’s Risk Management and Consultancy Services to our customers. This includes but is not limited to things like incident response scenario exercises, staff augmentation services, gap analysis and assessment against various international frameworks and regulations. Besides these I do a variety of control reviews across various sectors and industries and review the creation of policy, procedure and process documentation.

What was the process of applying for an internal role?  

I was interested in the RM&G role for a while, as I was thinking about moving away from a sales roles and broadening my horizons. Sales was a “job” for me, and I wanted to develop that into something more consultative. This RM&G role was not too technical, and I could transfer lots of the skills i'd learned in previous roles, plus I enjoy speaking to people. I contacted a member of our Talent Acquisition team to apply for the Junior Risk Management Consultant role, did the interview, and I got into the 6-months training program in November 2021. By June 2022, I was a Security Consultant!

I really enjoyed the diversity within the junior consultant program. The variety of services NCC delivers was great to learn about, and it was nice to brush up on the soft skills I already had, like stakeholder management and communication. As well as this, we did a lot of role playing exercises, shadowing people, and learned from lots of real-life scenarios.

What’s next?

I’d like to stay long-term with NCC, and develop into a higher level of seniority within managing consultancy. I’d like to develop my career towards PCI QSA – payment card industry qualified security assessor. That would mean making assessments for companies who use any kind of card payments. I find that really interesting, and it relates to everyone. This will mean I need five years of experience at least, so it’ll take a while, but I’m looking forward to it!