Belong advocate: Meet Jayden Hahne
Step behind the cybersecurity curtain with Junior Security Professional Jayden Hahne, who describes how the road-less travelled led him to Belong, as well as his professional journey so far.
Before beginning my internship, I didn’t know anything about Belong. Having never been in a corporate environment before, I thought it’d be everyone in suits and ties, but it surprised me — it was so much more than I expected.
I applied for my internship through CareerTrackers, which is a non-profit organisation that creates career pathways for Indigenous university students. This allowed me to set up meetings, put myself forward and be outside of my comfort zone. I really wanted to go after it, and I did this by going to networking events in Melbourne once a month.
On my first day, I did a short meet and greet with the Belong Senior Leading team. Although, I was a bit nervous, the energy and friendliness of everyone helped me come out of the shell a little bit.
The induction video that was put together, right at the start, there’s a minute worth of acknowledging and welcoming. Talking about the background of where we do business, it’s inspiring to see people recognise Aboriginal culture and history.
I started off with a week and a half in the Social Media team, which was a good chance to meet one of many news teams, before stepping into a role with Belong’s Security team. Given my studies in Business Information Systems — I was excited to step into a team that worked in my field, even though I learnt a lot from the people I met earlier.
During my short time working in the security space, I’ve been able to work on several projects, such as system abusers, while also investigating scam cases. I get a lot of support from my peers as I’m still learning a lot of the concepts and aspects of security, which I enjoy.
One of the systems I get to work with is called Splunk, a platform for viewing, analysis and querying data from multiple datasets. In my role, it’s also used to create human-readable graphs, as well as building dashboards and alerts for security.
Being new in my role with no security experience, the key skills I’ve been able to take into this job have been my ability to learn quickly and retain knowledge. Since joining the team, I’ve also expanded on my computing skills. There are so many different scenarios in security that you can come across — this is where critical thinking is important in my job. We need to look at the probability of each option, taking everything into account.
The work environment is pretty cool here, and the set-up of everything in the office is great, little things like the pool table and coffee machine in the lunch area. It’s a fun place to work — everyone is aware and respectful of each other’s culture as well.
Even though I’m still at university, I think it’s beneficial to have this role, it gives me a better insight into what the role would be like after my studies. There are situations where people finish their degree and aren’t sure what their industry looks like. But for me, being able to step in early gives me an advantage to other graduates.
Belong is an awesome place to work. I leave every day wanting to learn a lot more things and improve each day. I was incredibly happy when I got offered a full-time job at the end of my internship.
