Employee Spotlight: Q&As with SealingTech Talent!

Kim Nagy
Program Manager – Defensive Cyber Operations

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’d like to introduce you to one of the many amazing women here at SealingTech. If you’ve had the pleasure to work with Kim Nagy before, you know she’s a powerhouse capable of handling everything thrown at her. Learn more about Kim and what makes her tick:

Q: What do you spend the most time on during the day with SealingTech?

A: I have the great honor of leading an incredible program for a critical mission. We have so many great minds in the company and it’s important to constantly be communicating with others, planning, and researching to be able look forward to be the best to serve my customer and SealingTech.

While obviously focusing on cost, performance, and schedule day in and day out, it’s important to still always be in learning mode. I’m grateful for every day I get to serve our customer and their mission in this capacity. I really do pinch myself often when I think about what I get to do.

 

Q: Have you had a favorite woman mentor in your career? What did she teach you?

A: Absolutely. The Program Manager I supported prior to coming to SealingTech had me in awe every day. She was a technical lead when I first started working with her, became a PM, a Director after I transitioned to SealingTech, and is now a VP. There was nothing she couldn’t handle and was cool under fire. She is fearless. To add on to the excellence I got to witness, her handling of the pandemic was beyond incredible.

She always enabled me to do my job, and always empowered me to do more and own my work. This translated to being able to take more pride in what I did. I always want to do more and be even better than the day before, and she gave me the space to be just that. I always had a seat at the table to witness the strategic thinking behind planning, implementation, and execution. Allowing someone to witness things firsthand gives the greatest amount of experience. Without knowing it or ever formally becoming my mentor, she taught me how to pick a mentor that you respect, trust, has integrity, aligns most with where you want to be to truly motivate you to become that by modeling the things you admire most. She taught me about excellence simply by displaying it.

 

Q: Is there a woman in cybersecurity that inspires you?

A: This is an easy one! Jen Easterly, CISA Director is the first woman who comes to mind here. Her background in military service, cybersecurity service, and just overall human service in how she leads is remarkable and inspiring.

 

Q: Have you had the chance to mentor any young women?

A: Aside from my three teenage girls, not as often as I would like to and this question actually makes me want to be more pro-active about that! I think I can offer an interesting perspective as someone who started out on a completely different career path and spent so much of my time as an Administrative/Executive Assistant. I’d love to ensure young women know that nothing is ever out of their reach and it’s never too late to jump on a different path or dream bigger.

 

Q: What’s your “big why” or the one thing that drives you to do your best each day?

A: My biggest why is to have who I am point back to my faith. I truly believe I exist to serve and try to help spread a little light along the way. To serve is to be your best self and do your part in the world. When we are all being our best whether it be within our careers, personal lives, doing our best to give grace to all…we are doing our part to bring light into the world and make it a little less heavy for each other. Everything else is sort of a bonus, but knowing I have an opportunity to positively impact someone is what drives me. (I’m human though, and slip constantly…this means giving myself grace too haha!)

 

Q: Where do you look for inspiration or to continue learning?

A: I look at everything through the lens of what will make me better serve my customer. Understanding that everything is connected helps you look down the line and see what risks or efficiencies are possible. Knowing this motivates me greatly to always continue learning. There is so much more than formal learning/training. It also requires keeping an eye on real world/real time events. I usually wind-down for the night every night by reading statements and analyses by our nation’s key leaders as well as industry leaders.

 

Q: You chair SealingTech’s Community Investment & Green Initiatives Committee. Is there a project that stands out to you?

A: One of our core areas of focus is to lift up underserved communities and distribute whatever resources we can to them. There is so much light that could be shared with the world and we need to arm them with the opportunities to do so.

Imagine how many more contributors we could have right now or could have to bolster our cybersecurity posture. Focusing on increasing opportunities for communities with less resources only makes us all more successful in every area.

 

Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge working women face today?

A: This is a heavy one. I haven’t been everywhere nor have spoken to everyone, so I don’t want to generalize too much because every experience is different. I will say that there are still times where women feel like their voices don’t hold as much value as some of their male colleagues. I think we’ve come a long way but that generalization still rears its ugly head and sometimes it hinders one to be as vocal as they want to be. On the flip side, some women feel like they have to work 10x harder to prove they belong.

 

Q: What’s one thing you do to help create a more inclusive and diverse society for all women?

A: Messaging that we’re all in this together. One woman’s success does not take away from another woman’s success but rather paves the way for more women to breakthrough. We’re all contributors to something bigger and lifting one another up makes us all the more effective.

 

Q: What advice would you give to a young woman wanting to enter cybersecurity and other STEM fields?

A: Just do it! Wow, we need you. If you look around and don’t see enough women in the field, that can be your face there inspiring others to break into these critical fields later without question!

 

Q: What’s missing to drive other women to get involved in cybersecurity?

A: Most often I hear a big deterrent is that oftentimes women can’t tell if there is a strong presence of women in our cybersecurity and information technology workforce, to include leadership. Showing that there is a strong presence of women in leadership will help peak interests by knowing there is someone else you may be able to relate to better and diminish some insecurities/worries. Preceding that, I think we need to start the conversations early on with our youth and remove pre-conceived perceptions about what types of genders may perform a type of job. We connect the dots pretty quickly whether they are accurate or not and some gender biases formed when developing may lead to one thinking a role is not for them because of their gender.

 

Q: What’s the best part of working for SealingTech?

A: It’s all about action. SealingTech actively invests in its people and everyone’s ambitions to grow is inspiring. Also, I truly appreciate our agility and constant strive to iterate our technology to be the very best that it can be for our customers. The cyber landscape is an everchanging environment to work in and I truly believe that we don’t hold ourselves back from being able to evolve to address the threat, giving the cyber warfighters their best leg up to take on their missions.

 

Q: Anything else you’d like to share?

A: Go Ravens!