21 May 2025 | Dr Claudia Natanson MBE

Without mentoring, I wouldn’t be where I am today. When I think of mentoring, I think primarily of creating safe havens.

It is about allowing people to feel they can be themselves. With a great mentor, you can be vulnerable and open to saying where you need to grow to progress. If a mentee does not feel confident in a certain area, it is not for a mentor to affirm that, but to help them explore it and realise their potential for growth.

Who you select is crucial. Choosing the right mentor is a question of a match of personalities. It is the same reason we have a variety of friends all with different personality traits. We go to some friends for some things, and to others for other things.

Mentoring can be frightening, but what is important is that you as a mentee feel confident returning to the mentor and having open and honest discussions.

We know that more safe havens need to be created in the cyber security profession because if they were already in place, we wouldn't have so many people leaving the profession. Currently, we are seeing large numbers leave globally and we are also seeing more mental health issues than we've ever seen before.

Mentoring remains important regardless of someone’s experience level. Now, as a seasoned professional, when I go into a new organisation, I usually ask my line manager who they would recommend as a good person to mentor me. That way, I can quickly learn about the organisation: the business, the history, some of the challenges they personally had along the way to becoming what they are today.

One possible professional mentor is a line manager. When you have a line manager who can also be your mentor, it is an amazing experience. Most of my line managers, especially in the early stages of my career, have been amazing mentors. Throughout my subsequent career, moving to and from various companies, those line managers remained my mentors; to this day, they are my biggest cheerleaders!

When I started at BT, I had just finished my academic studies and found myself in this huge organisation with a sizeable workforce. Having mentors within the company allowed me to explore all the elements of critical national infrastructure relevant to the organisation needed securing. You had the network, command and control centres, and undersea cables, for example, and this was like a playground for me because I wanted to know how it all worked. Becoming familiar with this allowed me to successfully pitch to senior leadership the need to switch focus to the internet, and I subsequently founded the UK’s first commercial globally accredited Computer Emergency Response Team. This strong mentoring continued into working and thriving even more with mentoring in my next role at Diageo. These were the most impressionable years in my profession.

The importance of the Cyber Access Network

Everything that I do for the Council is because of the amazing mentoring support that I myself have received over the years. Because of how I was mentored from my very first day at BT, I feel motivated to give back to the profession. If the Council can help organisations offer mentoring in cyberspace in a meaningful way through spaces like the Cyber Access Network (CAN), it will help cybersecurity roll out maintenance adoption in their own organisations.

Another merit of mentoring is its role in helping us all change the perception and awareness of cyber security as a career for young people. The profession has not always done a good job of advertising itself. For most people leaving school, I am not sure cyber security is high on their list of possible career routes. This is partly because the image of the ‘hacker in a hoodie’ has been instilled in them, as opposed to the reality that cyber security is an integral part of nearly every area of a business.

About the Author

Dr. Claudia Natanson, MBE, is a highly respected thought leader, information and cyber security professional, and consultant within the international arena. Recognised as a leading technology influencer by the Financial Times, she works across diverse industry sectors, FTSE 100, Fortune 500, government, and growing organisations.

A European Commission information and cyber security expert, she has over 20 years of experience helping organisations achieve cyber resilience and meet global compliance and regulatory obligations. Her work has included being Chair of the Corporate Executive Programme(CEP) and a board and Steering Committee member of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams(FIRST.org). She is Chair of the UK Cyber Security Council, a UK Cyber Security Advisory Board member, Member NationalCynber Advisory Board, NED, Babcock International. She was named a top cyber security leader for 2022 by the Security Magazine, received an MBE in Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee 2022 Honours for services to cyber security, placed #1 in the cyber security category in the 2022 global IFSEC fire and safety awards, awarded a place in the UK's 2022 & 2023 Power List, and included in Computer Weekly's 2022 & 2023 list of women influencing in the technology sector.