I planned a career in telecommunications regulation because I wanted to be a tech lawyer. It didn’t happen as I had planned. Over the next couple of years, what held steady was the SET OF SKILLS and guidance I got along the way, and in the end those mattered more than any of the plans.
In my 5th year at the University, I thought I knew where I was going.
In my fourth and fifth years I went to several career talks. As a final year students, various sessions had visiting speakers and alumni came back to talk about their work and what the next decade might look like. I listened for one thing: which fields were growing, and what people like me be would be doing a few years after graduating.
The answer I kept hearing was technology but the only technology I was familiar with was telecommunications. So I wrote my final-year project on dispute resolution in the telecommunications sector. I hoped to go on to the National regulator for the industry I had just spent a year reading about.
That didn’t happen. That plan because it failed without any drama. There was no crisis and no big lesson at the time. The door I was working towards simply didn’t open, and I had to walk through a different one.
The preparation still counted.
It’s easy to look back on an abandoned plan as wasted effort. In my case that would be wrong.
The telecommunications project didn’t get me the job I wanted. What it did was helped me understand regulation as a system: how obligations are placed on operators, infrastructure and service providers were managed when disputes come up between providers and subscribers who depend on each other, and how a regulator tries to govern infrastructure it did not own. At the time I thought that was preparation for one sector. It turned out to be preparation for the question I work on today.
The pattern has repeated itself over decades. While a popular saying goes that “history does not repeat itself, people and system repeat history.”
In my second year at the University I became an apprentice to a mentor who ran an IT business, learning graphics and print media production. By the end of my third year I had also joined the chambers of a Senior Advocate of Nigeria who had a well stocked library with journals and materials from local and international conferences on law and technology issues. I got drawn far into them than usual.
Two things were becoming clear to me. I wasn’t going to be a typical lawyer, and I didn’t yet know what kind of lawyer I would be.
After the Law School and qualifying as a barrister and solicitor, I served my country for a year and worked at a law firm as a corporate and litigation counsel. That seemed to settle the plan. I would practise law.
Then a friend of a friend invited me to join a Digital Skills training team.
Then the plan changed
I didn’t expect a training assignment to change the direction of my career. I took it because I enjoyed teaching and because I was already comfortable with digital tools from my years in publishing and design.
The course covered a lot of ground. The part I couldn’t put down was cybersecurity: helping ordinary people stay safe online.
I had seen both sides of technology much earlier. The training centre where I learned desktop publishing was also a cybercafé and business centre, and I saw how the same machines served legitimate work and fraud. Growing up in Nigeria, I knew that “yahoo-yahoo” was a crime, not a clever hustle. It taught me that the skills used to deceive people could also be used to protect them, if you learned to think the way an attacker thinks while staying on the right side of the law.
Around the same time, I kept seeing cybersecurity on the top of lists of skills in global short supply. That gave my honest curiosity a direction.
I also knew something about myself. I didn’t want a career spent writing code for hours on end. I’m most effective with people: explaining, facilitating, persuading and translating. For a while that seemed like a barrier to working in cybersecurity. It turned out to be the way in.
Over the following years I delivered digital-skills training to more than 23,000 participants in programmes supported by Google over the period of 4 years. I learned to explain unfamiliar technology to business owners, graduates, community groups and senior audiences, each of whom needed something different from the same topic. I didn’t think of that as security experience then. I now think of it as some of the most useful security experience I have.
Pushing forward
Looking back, my career looks less like a plan I followed and more like a set of skills that kept being useful in rooms I hadn’t planned to be in.
Legal training taught me to ask who owes a duty, to whom, and on what terms. Every security programme depends on that question, whether or not anyone asks it out loud.
Contract work came first at a technology incubator and later across large supplier portfolios. It taught me the gap between what an agreement promises and what an organisation can actually check, enforce or recover.
Privacy work taught me that data protection is not really a document exercise. It is a question of where information goes, who can reach it and whether anyone can prove what happened to it.
Training and facilitation taught me that a control nobody understands is a control nobody will operate.
Security leadership is where those four meet. The questions are: who is responsible, who can act, what can be proven, and what happens when the organisation depends on something it doesn’t control?
I didn’t plan that combination. But I can see now that every “unplanned change” contributed to it.
What should you do as a Law Graduate?
I’m wary of career advice that turns someone’s path into a formula. Mine included guidance, reverse engineering, timing and people who opened doors for me when they didn’t have to. Still, a few things have held true often enough that I would repeat them to anyone early in their career. I once sat with Mr M. who drew a sample direction, full story for another day.
Qualifications, experience and skills do different jobs. Certain qualifications will get you shortlisted. Practical experience will carry you through interviews and industry conversations. Technical skill is what keeps you in the process when you’re asked to prove you can do the work. Each one matters, and none of them replaces the others.
Choose a scarce skill and go deep. If I were starting again, I would find three to five skills that are in short supply globally and likely to stay that way for five to ten years. Then I would pick one, get very good at it, and talk about it with anyone willing to listen. Podcasts, lectures and free courses are enough to start with. Consistency matters more than the resource.
Share what you know before you feel qualified to. Even at entry level, what you know can set you apart if you’re willing to show it. The professionals I learn most from teach while they’re still learning, including myself.
Treat a failed plan as feedback. When a door doesn’t open, ask what the preparation gave you, not only what it failed to get you. Very often the answer is more than you think.
Don’t try to force your way in. People talk about “breaking into” cybersecurity as if the field were a locked building. In my experience, most doors open to people who keep knocking: showing up, contributing and being specific about what they can offer.
Beyond my story
I work between law, technology and governance: obligations placed on organisations depending on infrastructure, identities or evidence it can’t fully control?
Very few people set out to specialise in that. They get there by accumulating different kinds of fluency until they can see where responsibility and capability separate. For me that was the legal duty on one side, the technical reality on the other, and the contracts and processes in between.
If your career hasn’t followed the plan, that may not mean you’re behind. It may mean you’re building a combination that nobody else in the room has.
Plans are useful. They give effort a direction. But they’re a hypothesis, not a promise. Keep building the skills that survive a change of plan, because those are the ones that will still be with you when the plan changes again.