Webinar recap: Land your dream career in STEM with Google’s Harrison Mbugi

Accel iQ host Miles Campbell is joined by Google security engineer Harrison Mbugi and Careers With STEM’s Heather Catchpole to to talk about on careers in technology.

Our three-part webinar series Land your dream career in STEM has kicked off with a spotlight on the technology sector. In part one, host Miles Campbell is joined by Google security engineer Harrison Mbugi and Careers With STEM’s Heather Catchpole to chat about education, job interviews, graduate opportunities and the future of technology careers. 

If you couldn’t make it, you can catch up with a full replay of the webinar below to see what you’ve missed. You can also get a deeper insight into Harrison’s life and career trajectory with our feature profile.

Harrison’s role at Google

“My role is security engineering. As a security engineer there’s a lot you can do but at the moment I work on building detection within the company. We build detection so we can proactively identify threats to our information security systems.”

Harrison’s typical day as a security engineer at Google

“Then our systems detect certain behaviours and notify us – we have to investigate. I spend a good amount of time thinking on the different ways that someone might gain unauthorised access to our systems. That’s thinking on what we call threat modelling.”

Harrison on important skills for a security engineer

“One of the things that is important is understanding security engineering, so at least having an understanding of cybersecurity is very important.”

“Surprisingly, there are certain things that when I was in school I didn’t think were that important, like communication skills and knowing how to communicate. Things like communicating verbally, speaking to someone else, writing documents for other people to read. Leadership skills are also very important.”

Harrison on preparing for a job interview

“The overall preparation for the interview was the accumulation of a small amount of work that I’ve been doing. The school work but also the work experience. I was very conscious in selecting work that aligned with my interests. The work I did was related to IT work. That, to me, is the best way to prepare if you have that opportunity. When the interview came, the only thing I had to do was go through what I already know.”

Heather on the Australian technology sector 

“There’s currently around half a million people working in technology jobs in Australia, so it’s a huge sector and it’s one of the main contributors to our success and our gross national product. We’re looking to up that in a few short years to one million, so we’re looking to double the amount of people that are working in technology in a short amount of time. So basically it’s an amazing time to get into technology.”

Heather on the diversity of tech careers

“It’s a really diverse area. You might not necessarily work for a big company, you might work for a non-profit, you might work for a small start-up business, you might work for Woolies or a fashion company or conservation, land management company. Everybody is crying out for technological skills so it’s really diverse in terms of the different sectors that you can work in and the different jobs that you can do.”

In our next webinar, we’ll hear from Danika Smith, STEM graduate and water planner with ARUP. We’ll talk about engineering opportunities for young grads, high school and university education and what it’s like to work in water planning. We’ll be chatting from 5pm on Thursday 10th February. Register now to secure your spot.