This post is coming from my own personal experience. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a career coach for neurodivergent people or a counselor in any way. There are plenty of professionals that can provide knowledgeable guidance to disabled individuals looking to advance their career, and I am not legally certified to be one of them. Your decisions made based off of this post are not my responsibility.
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I was really skeptical about creating this blog post. But every now and the,n I have flashbacks to those days when I thought I was incapable of getting a job in IT. Every person I met just gave the same advice. They told me to just "learn to code" like it wasn't the first thing I considered. I even discouraged myself: "I cant code. I can't put a hammer to a nail. Blah Blah Blah." I couldn't just roll with the punches and stomach working in a job I didn't fit in. Thankfully, I discovered my pain in cybersecurity and how it actually benefitted my neurodivergent way of thinking.
As someone with ADHD, I learned you really have to have an interest in what you're working on. If you hate what you're doing, not only will you know, but so will everybody else around you. It will be painfully obvious that you hate your job and produce results that benefit no one. So I thought to myself that if I could probably reach one person with ADHD, then this blog post will help them.
The first reason is why I think cybersecurity is a great career for people with ADHD is that there's been a lot of research showing that they have neurodivergent thinking, they can overcome knowledge constraints and they have conceptual expansions. [1] All of these three things are really good to have within the IT field. I find it beneficial in my experience because I believe it helps me consider perspectives that my peers did not think of before.
The second reason why I think it is a great career choice is that there are a ton of different opportunities within the tech industry. For example:
and so on. It satiates that constant desire to jump in and get introduced to a million different industries. because the customers you communicate with are so varied in the cybersecurity world (sometimes a basic user to a knowledgeable subject matter expert), it helps to continuously learn new technologies for that customer. You're not going to implement the same solution over and over and over. Whenever your job feels stale or you are getting weighed down with imposter syndrome, it thankfully becomes a norm because...
You don't have to worry about becoming trapped into a field that you grow tired of because whatever skill you just gained, you can easily leverage that to get a different job that may be completely different. Being a jack of many IT trades might actually make you look more appealing. You could also just change jobs every year or two and actually increase your salary during that time. I know in some fields, job hopping is not good, but in the IT world, it is can help you thrive.
I find this part hard to describe to either a non-technical person or a neurotypical person. So bear with me here...
Much like "kids these days with their phones," technology in this day and age is permeated with instant feedback. If you break something or fix something, don't worry you'll know. Did it turn on? Did I get an error screen? Why? Can I connect onto the intranet? For every error screen you get, there is an expertly crafted, easily searchable explanation laying out there on the internet to help you out.
While some people may have an issue working remote to to just the lack of structure, I find it that there are way less distractions. I can just stay in my room and just work. When I was at the office more than once, did I walk around to people's desks and like just talk to them for like hours? There are plenty of remote options and to me, this improves my productivity. A symptom of ADHD is a non-awareness of time (sometimes called "time blindness"), so looking at that time and seeing how much time has passed helps me stay focused.
I get bored easily and my mind likes to wander. IT is a great field where you can leverage your skills that you learned and then go and get a higher paying job or just or switch fields within the tech industry pretty easily, so you're never really going to be trapped.
and I don't know if my path can be replicated. But I'm glad I'm doing what I love in the cybersecurity field. While riding this blog post, I realized this is the first time I actually thrived in my work. There's a constant desire to treat this as something beyond a job. I'm surprised how often I check out new trends in the cybersecurity field and dive into research regarding security alerts. If you are reading this and you are neurodivergent, I just want to say that there is hope and I can assure you that you can find a career field that you love.
[1]White, H. A., & Shah, P. (2006). Uninhibited imaginations: Creativity in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Personality and Individual Differences, 40(6), 1121–1131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.11.007