Remote Career Development: Ashu Savani Of TryHackMe On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With David Liu

Organizing social activities like lunches and events can be useful for team building and collaboration. We host bi-weekly lunches and hackathons — which consist of challenges, games, and team building. The reception from the team here is amazing and helps bring everyone together.

Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaboration with others, and knowing yourself well enough to be able to continually assess your strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging enough when you work in an office, but what if you work remotely? How does remote work affect your career development? How do you nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues? How can you help your employees do this? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely”. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ashu Savani.

Ashu Savani is a co-founder of TryHackMe — a cyber security training company. Ashu and his partner Ben discovered a significant niche for entertaining, accessible, and understandable cyber security training — in a market that was previous rigid and unexciting. TryHackMe was born to bridge this gap and offer gamified cyber security training suited to the complete beginner through to the seasoned expert.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

I was born and brought up in Nairobi, Kenya. I spent most of my life there before moving to the UK to complete a master's degree in Computer Science from UCL. I’ve always been passionate about technology and security. I started tinkering with Visual Basic in the early days and enjoyed disassembling electronics just to see how things worked. (I could never put them back together though!)

I met Ben (the other co-founder of TryHackMe,) during a security internship in London. We noticed that there was a significant lack of tools for teaching cyber security. Everything focused on a black box approach, where users had to figure out what happened alone. There wasn’t enough room for beginners of all skill levels to learn the industry, which sparked a plan. Ben and I built TryHackMe as a side project, to make it convenient to learn security. It originally started as a passion project for the two of us, but as we released this to the security communities on Reddit/Twitter we saw how big a demand there was. Fast-forward 3 years, we’ve hired over 25 talented people from all over the world, and have continued to build out the product and company.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We were running university events in the early days of TryHackMe, to raise more awareness and give students the opportunity to learn about cyber security. We had more than 20 universities sign up and more than 500 people using the application simultaneously. Since TryHackMe started as a side project, we were not well equipped to handle load and the application went down right as the event was beginning! Luckily, we were able to use alternate means to run the event while we solved the issue.

We have learnt that these technology failures can be common. When things like this happen, it can seem like the end of the world, but laughing about it and working to resolve the issue is the best way to go forward!

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

While the advice might seem obvious, you need to keep communicating with your employees, not just about the work they’re doing, but how they’re feeling about the work and what’s been going on in their personal lives. You want to understand their general mood and feelings (without being too invasive) as there can be a lot of personal factors that may lead to burn out.

While the nature of their work may change (as not all work may be interesting), you need to ensure that employees are doing work they enjoy and that you’re providing the right growth opportunities through this work.

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

Working remotely gives individuals a new level of comfort. We usually see that individuals working in their own environments are at ease and work more productively. This effect is amplified for individuals with other commitments (such as taking care of family) as these individuals will have a lot more flexibility to work and manage their other commitments.

Alongside this, working remotely is also usually somewhat optional. Our workforce thrive through remote working, yet everyone takes it differently. For instance, some team members prefer to be in the comfort of their own home, yet others work whilst traveling, in coffee shops, or on the beach. Remote working brings about this flexibility which can be amazing for productivity and employee happiness.

Can you articulate for our readers what the main challenges are regarding working remotely?

The main challenges we face with remote work are:

• An increased risk of isolation as there is no in-person interaction and forming connections with co-workers becomes more complicated over digital media. Whilst employees can choose to work from different places around the world, there is a lack of face-to-face co-worker relationship building.
• There can be less of a separation between working and living environments as individuals can all work in the same space — this makes is harder to define boundaries and can lead to overworking.
• There can also be an increased chance of fatigue as individuals would spend a lot of time in meetings and computer screens.
• Depending on how large the organizations are, it’s very easy for teams/sub-teams to go into silos, making cross-team communication difficult.

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

• There is an increased risk of isolation as there is no in-person interaction and forming connections with co-workers is harder over digital media:
• Holding in-person events from time to time is beneficial to building relationships. This doesn’t have to be a regular occurrence to start seeing benefits, as seeing relationships form throughout the team also transitions to online work.
• Organizing social activities like lunches and events can be useful for team building and collaboration. We host bi-weekly lunches and hackathons — which consist of challenges, games, and team building. The reception from the team here is amazing and helps bring everyone together.
• We use a drop-in discord channel with a virtual room with music to make it easier for colleagues to hang out together.
• There can be less of a separation between working and living environments as individuals can all work in the same space — this makes is harder to define boundaries and can lead to overworking.
• Work with the employees to identify the separation and help them structure their working schedule.
• Providing office equipment/access to co-working spaces can also be great as employees will have better defined physical boundaries.
• There can also be an increased chance of fatigue as individuals would spend a lot of time in meetings and computer screens:
• Focusing on asynchronous/remote communication to discourage call heavy culture.
• Depending on how large the organizations are, it’s very easy for teams/sub-teams to go into silos — this makes cross-team communication difficult:
• Foster communication and collaboration through events across multiple teams.

Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?

It’s important to start with a rough idea of career progression within the team/company in general. While this may seem obvious, it’s more important for start-ups that are scaling their headcount. Designing a career framework that defines career progression in terms of job titles, responsibilities, and salaries provides structure to the entire process and stability for your employees.

Once this structured career progression is refined, it’s up to the management to work with their employees to understand their personal goals; and how these goals align to the career framework and the team. The manager should work with the employee to define goals and check in with them consistently to assess the progress of these goals.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

We have seen first-hand how access to tech training can change lives — lives of people all around the world. With access to a computer, the jobs and training available are really limitless, which is fascinating and fulfilling. We keep our prices at a minimum of $10 a month and offer free events and pathways to make education in our space as accessible as possible. I would love to see this rise in educational tech spread even further and continue to make a stir — giving people the opportunity for learning, jobs, and bright futures.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

We post all company updates on the TryHackMe newsroom: https://tryhackme.com/resources/newsroom

And I’m available on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashu-savani-023547114/

Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success.