Your Most Valuable Skills Aren’t Technical

About this episode

Rob Knoblauch discusses the importance of soft skills in cybersecurity leadership.

Cybersecurity debates tend to center on tools, frameworks, and threats. But Rob Knoblauch has built a 25-year career in global security leadership by focusing on the soft skills that determine whether a CISO survives, thrives, or burns out. In this episode of The New CISO, Rob joins Steve Moore to trace the through-line from running a multi-node BBS as a kid to serving as Deputy CISO of one of the world’s largest banks — and the career lessons he’s carried through every chapter. Rob’s path wasn’t engineered. It began with a VIC-20, a love of video games, and a side passion for DJing that eventually clinched his first big bank interview. Running a BBS taught him identity management, patching, and infrastructure long before those were industry terms, and responding to the Melissa and “I Love You” outbreaks as a twenty-something Toronto Stock Exchange analyst launched his pivot into information security. The conversation turns to leading at scale. Rob walks through the three mentors who shaped him — “the teacher” who grounded him in fundamentals at Bank of Montreal, “the coach” who taught him the collaborative nature of global operations at Scotiabank, and “the general” who…

People in this episode

Host: Steve Moore

Guest: Rob Knoblauch

Topics covered

• cybersecurity
• soft skills
• leadership
• incident response
• career development

Keywords

• cybersecurity
• CISO
• leadership
• soft skills
• incident response
• career lessons
• mentorship

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, Toronto Stock Exchange

Products: VIC-20

Places: Canada

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