A critical part of ensuring adequate, safe and reliable operations amid a crisis includes comprehensive tabletop exercises to demonstrate and assess capabilities before an event occurs.

Security teams of all sectors face incidents of violence, anxiety, escalation and trauma during their careers. For a security leader, fostering a healthy workplace environment following trauma or helping managers and frontline security personnel navigate such incidents is particularly essential to healing, reducing turnover, and allowing everyone in the workplace to feel heard, respected and confident.

Dana Wright has established herself within the law enforcement and security industry. She has amassed two decades of law enforcement experience, which included 15 years of leadership experience, before moving into the private sector.

Aerin Washington has vivid memories of going with her University Police Officer dad to work while in middle school and high school. She would volunteer to help out at the ID card shop and do other odds and ends for security around the campus. There was also the safety camp where she volunteered to be McGruff the Crime Dog.

Amanda Vutsinas has experience and passion in the security industry, but she also has an incredible drive, not only for her own personal and professional development, but for encouraging others to reach higher as well.

Without a plan for her future, Tracy Skibins joined the Army Reserves out of high school to help pay for her college tuition. She became a military police officer and loved it. After college she joined the South Bend Police Department in Indiana working the night shift.

Andi Roddy, Chief of the Nuclear Command and Control Systems Cybersecurity Group at the National Security Agency (NSA), has spent her entire professional career with the agency. Her interest was sparked after hearing stories from her grandfather who had worked for the precursor agency to the NSA during World War II.

Linda Reid always wanted to make a difference. It’s just when she was first in college at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) majoring in 18th century literature, she thought that difference would be as an author writing the next transformative great American novel.

Lisa Oliveri’s career in security happened organically. She was pursuing a career in science and medicine, of all things, when she was first exposed to crisis response and incident reporting as a resident assistant of a dormitory.

Though Heather O’Brien says that nepotism played a role in getting her that unpaid document-shredding job at the age of 10 (her father was a security guard company executive), as well as the one where she coordinated the company e-newsletter at 12 for which she recruited her friends’ help and had her first foray in leadership — there’s no mistake that her hard work, career trajectory and impressive resume within security are all her own.