How to Find a Great Employer After Your Haiku Training

Haiku will provide you with the skills to find a career as a cybersecurity professional. But how do you choose the right employer?

Haiku provides the valuable skills necessary to gain employment. We help by offering a gamified experience to education to keep you entertained, engaged, and excited to learn more and more. It’s a great system designed to give you the tools needed to impress employers with real-world knowledge that could easily make the difference between them getting hacked or protecting the business.

The beauty with our training is the wide array of opportunities for you to pursue. Almost every organization and business are in dire need for cybersecurity professionals. With the skyrocketing rates of cyberattacks, everyone is rushing to protect themselves.

That leaves you, the up-and-coming cybersecurity professional, with a stark advantage. You can choose to work in the finance industry, the government sector, private business or even a nonprofit organization to help give back.

Organizational Toxicity

But there is one thing we cannot tell you – the organizational health of a hiring employer. And by that we mean:

• What’s it like working for this company?
• Do they have a harsh, toxic work environment?
• Do they beat people down with unreasonable workloads?
• Are the deadlines so tight I would have to work at home to keep up?
• Do current employees enjoy working for this company?

These are all legitimate questions.

At worst, you could end up working at a very toxic environment that has normalized yelling at staff, has extremely low morale and shows no respect for its employees.

At best, you can end up in a thriving environment who respects, values, and listens to their employees. These types of companies routinely offer training, always care about what their employees say and build an environment around mutual trust and respect.

But how are you supposed to know which companies are toxic or not. This is difficult to ascertain but there are clues to look out for. If possible, try speaking to current and former employees or go online and do some research. You can even prepare some questions to ask during the interview.

Five Potential Red Flags

1. The company is constantly hiring.

If you find out that the company is constantly hiring people, that could be a red flag.

Several things could be going on. They may have low retention rates and high turnover of staff. This is a bad sign because there are reasons employees don’t stick around.

If you discover a company is constantly hiring – they’re likely constantly firing.

2. The company relies solely on quotas and goals to measure success.

In a toxic work environment, the morale is low, and employees don’t care much about their work quality. They sink into the mentality of “do the minimal amount of work to avoid getting fired”.

When that happens, employers develop a heavy reliance on quotas and goals to determine if an employee is productive enough or not.

Although many companies operate this way and are profitable, it may be an indication that they see the employees less as people as more as resources. Do you want to be treated as a person or as a resource?

3. The company has a thorough, in-depth disciplinary process.

When a company has toxic leadership and a toxic environment, disciplinary issues routinely arise. When an employee simply doesn’t care and has mentally checked out, problems happen.

These problems may be simple tardiness, poor work quality, negative attitudes and even disobedience and insubordination.

When a company becomes accustomed to this culture, they create a comprehensive disciplinary process that includes suspensions, written reprimands, warnings – all the way up to termination.

When the company has this disciplinary system mastered, it’s a red flag.

4. Employees don’t know the names of company leadership.

In mid to larger size companies, it is very easy for upper management to lose sight of the ground floor, day-to-day operations. This upper echelon of leadership gets so busy, they don’t have time to (or choose not to) connect with the lower-level staff.

When that happens, employees have no reason to care about who the company leadership is. And they’re right. Why bother learning who the leaders are if they don’t take the time to say hello?

If an employee doesn’t know who the senior leadership is, that’s a red flag. It says there’s a large gap between upper management and frontline staff – a dysfunctional organizational trait.

5. Groups or “clicks” form within the company.  

When a company lacks effective leadership and ignore employee morale, groups or “clicks” form. This represents a divided environment and a lack of a teamwork atmosphere.

When employees feel their role in the company is “just another job”, one of the few positives they find is to hang around other employees they get along with. It also creates a divide between the other employees they don’t get along with.

This happens because the leadership of the organization allows it to happen. They are not taking any proactive steps to create a more friendly, welcoming environment for everyone.

Any time there’s a clue or tip of poor leadership existing, that’s a major red flag.

After you receive your training and certification from Haiku and you’re ready to start a fulfilling career as a cybersecurity professional, keep an eye out for these red flags.

Part of a rewarding career is to work in a healthy, team-oriented environment where the leadership values its employees. Between this advice and our training, you’re prepared for a great future.

And it all starts at Haiku.

– Haiku