I have a favor to ask- please consider taking a survey on attitudes about your career in Information Security. I’m helping a group of smart folks look into what makes InfoSec folks tick, and what makes us twitch.
This survey is mostly focused on your current situation, and this specific survey was selected because it is a standard measurement recognized by folks who study such things; this means aggregated results can be used for comparison with other professions (where there is survey data available) and averages.
The survey is copyrighted, and has some license restrictions imposed on anyone who uses it, the most notable is that unique logins are required for anyone taking the survey. This means we need you to send a request to take the survey, and provide us an email address under your control so we can reply with a link to the survey, and enter the address in permitted users list. We do not care what email address you use, so feel free to use an anonymous account from any of the freebies like Gmail, Hotmail/Live, etc. The survey site requires a username, we are using the email address you provide as the username- again, we’re happy with anonymized addresses. If you request to take the survey we do ask that you follow through and take it, each email address we enter counts as a licensed survey, whether completed or not and we pay per license to administer the survey.
We are going to give a $100 Amazon gift card to a randomly selected survey respondent as an incentive, if you are interested in that and use a “disposable” email address you may want to keep the account until early March when the winner is notified.
What to expect:
The first step is to request access to the survey and provide consent to participate (see below). We will send a survey link to each person requesting to participate.
At the survey site enter the email address used for the request, create a password to complete account setup, then continue to the survey.
The survey starts ten demographic questions, these will help categorize results, and discover patterns- but they are optional, if you wish to skip any, please do.
The survey itself has a sample question and sixteen real questions, all multiple choice.
Expect to spend ten to fifteen minutes total on the registration and survey. Unless you obsess over stuff, like I often do- but even then it shouldn’t take much more than fifteen minutes.
The privacy and confidentiality bits:
The survey data is downloaded with email addresses included, they will be stripped from the data immediately. We will keep two files, one with email addresses only (for notifying the winner of the gift card), the other with raw data (demographic data and survey results). When the current project is complete and winner notified, all email addresses will be deleted from files and email system used for the survey, and we will request the data be purged from the survey administration site. Anonymized results will be analyzed, and the results presented at appropriate venues, but raw data and email address files will always be encrypted when retrieved from the survey host, both file-level and full-disk encryption, using two different encryption applications.
There is more info on the survey website. If you would like to participate, please submit the Contact form on the survey site, or send an email to info@careerstudy.org consenting to participate and we will reply with a link to the survey.
I know you have a lot of demands on your time, I would be grateful if you would consider participating in this survey and sharing ten to fifteen minutes to help our research.
Thanks
Jack
