Hi, I’m Jason. I’m a junior governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) specialist. My team helps employees build their judgment, knowledge, and confidence in this complicated area. I first started using the Immersive Labs platform a few years ago when I was a student – I loved it so much that I got a job here.
Alongside my role here, I’m also a competitive athlete. My sport is the triple jump. As we’re in competition season now, my typical day starts with a training session at my local athletics track. This could be a short sprint session or a bit of power work in the gym depending on what I have on my program for the week.
By 9 AM I’m dialed in ready for work. My day normally starts off with the team standup, where we establish our objectives for the day and identify any blockers we’re facing that could impact our tasks. We set our workload out ahead of each quarter and break it down into sizable chunks called sprints, which last for two weeks.
After the standup, I begin my research for a GRC exercise that I’m developing during this sprint. Over the last few months, the team and I have built a number of GRC exercises about different areas of cybersecurity standards, regulations, and laws.
For example, I created an exercise where the learner plays the role of an internal auditor. They’re presented with decisions about whether a certain set of controls are compliant with ISO 27001, which is an international standard on how to manage information security.
We write these exercises so managers and organizations can see how well their employees understand a particular GRC topic – making them confident that their workforce is ready to meet the security challenges they’ll meet in cyberspace.
We do this in a more interactive way rather than your standard multiple-choice or true/false questions. The exercises are for critical industries across the globe, so they’ve got to be thorough – and more importantly, interesting! Extensive research and quality reviews with our in-house psychologists and proofreaders help us level up in terms of quality, and user feedback allows us to constantly refine the work we’ve built so far.
Like everyone, there are times during the day when I hit a mental block. But luckily, my brilliant team is always happy to brainstorm, share valuable ideas, and give advice to help me build great content. Now and then, I also work with the design team to share ideas about the images that will advertise the exercises in the catalog – or even form part of the rich media attachments in the exercise itself that enhance the user experience.
Then, I take a break from developing exercises to check in on our two new GRC starters. I give them each a quick call to make sure they’ve been able to access all of our systems and applications, and answer their questions about our processes.
After lunch, I start preparing a presentation for our first GRC team day. I’ve been tasked with talking about our team strategy and showing off some of our latest work. Public speaking is something I’ve struggled with in the past, but with opportunities like this and the support of my manager, I’m slowly growing more confident.
When the end of the day rolls around, I shut my down laptop and head back to the track. My coach and I have high hopes for the upcoming season, which means a lot of preparation. It’s my dream to compete in the Olympics and other major championships – so watch this space!
