Andrea Manning: ‘You have to take those big scary leaps’

Andrea Manning found her calling when she returned to studies in her 40s. Not necessarily with the intention of getting into the world of cybersecurity, but with a real intent to create a separate life for herself. “I kind of knew that I had to make a change for my future, but also because my daughter was young then, she was six or seven and I knew that I had to start making plans now for once she became a teenager and didn’t want me around. I just started building my own life. I remember saying to her, if you don’t let me go to college when you go to the movies with your friends, I’m going to have to come along with you because I won’t have my own life. Now she’s 18 and it’s exactly that – I can dive into my career because I’m free, but I had to start building that 10 years ago,” she explains.

Manning took an access course, which then led to her doing a four-year degree in business information systems in Galway. “I always have this thing of just saying yes and then I figure out the details afterwards because if I had known what that course involved, I would have run a mile because there was so much maths in it, and at school, I failed maths,” she says.

Failing was not on the cards here; she graduated at the age of 51, ready to find work in her new vocation. “When I graduated, I tried to get jobs – I was a graduate, but I was older with other experience that wasn’t relevant – so I couldn’t find a job because nobody knew what to do with me. I wasn’t one thing or the other,” she says.

An internship during college gave Manning GDPR experience, which she found was an area she found she could work in, so she began consulting in it. “I really enjoyed it. I was educating people and training them. But while I was doing all that, I could see how insecure small businesses were when it came to their cybersecurity,” she says. This prompted Manning to make cybersecurity training more accessible to small businesses, and just as SMEs were forced out of the office and online, she created a solution to educate such businesses in cybersecurity, in bite-sized chunks, through her start-up, CyberPie. “CyberPie was an app that would help small businesses DIY their cybersecurity, and I have always had this ability where I can translate complex technical things into human,” she explains.

The start-up landscape is not easy when you are trying to get your company off the ground and keep another source of income coming in until your side hustle can sustain itself. “I was literally running it on a shoestring, and it just wasn’t sustainable. I wish people would be more honest about that,” she says. Although she could see plenty of opportunities to join well-backed courses and training in the world of start-ups, there seemed to be very little actual funding going to the start-ups themselves. “You don’t get the money, and actually all you want is the money – there’s a whole business supporting start-ups – it filters the money off in the middle layer and it doesn’t come through to you,” she explains.

She needed to move on with her career and get a salaried job. “From acceptance comes freedom, and I just knew I could not financially survive,” she says about the decision to walk herself into a job at one of consulting’s Big Four for a couple of years. “It wasn’t an easy job, but I did learn a lot about myself, about what I was good at, what I wasn’t good at, what I wanted and what I just would not accept,” she said.

She used the role as a stepping stone to her current role as Chief Information Security Officer at Acorn Life DAC, where she is elbow-deep in compliance again. This time, in the form of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the framework for digital operational resilience for the financial sector. “It’s exciting times. I love it because I love a bit of regulation,” she says. “The DORA regulation was the best training ground for me because it’s so closely connected with the operations side, because operations have to test with their business continuity plans, what if systems go down, what if this goes down, how will we serve our customers? I’ve had to work with the compliance people, the risk people, the operations people, the new product people because DORA has got its fingers in everywhere,” she adds. “I found my home, I love my job, I love everything I’m doing. I love the learning. I love the possibilities, I’m in my comfortable place again – most people hate regulation, but I found a way to make it cool.”

Looking back on the time she grabbed her former career in the travel trade by the horns, looked it in the eye and decided to head off in a new direction, what gave her the catalyst to jump? “I just knew that I was destined for more. You know, that feeling of not fulfilling my potential,” she says. “You have to take those big scary leaps, and I’ve taken so many of them, I’m just used to it, where I have no idea what I’m doing, but I know I’ll figure it out because I’ve done it before, again and again, and again. I’ve got that experience under my belt, I know that I’ve survived things where I’ve been so out of my depth and that’s what allows me to go on,” she says. “That is the beauty of age.”