Perfect mix of lifestyle and job opportunities makes SA a magnet for young talent

Moving from NSW to South Australia has brought exciting new job and lifestyle opportunities for cyber security adviser Bec Williams.

In early 2020, my partner was finishing his PhD so we decided to apply for roles all over the country. We wanted to get out of Sydney. He applied for a job at The University of Adelaide so I started looking for positions in cyber security. We both play musical instruments and have travelled around Australia quite a bit for national competitions; we’d been to Adelaide and really liked it – but living here has more than met our expectations.

We love the lack of traffic, how nice and respectful people are – you get that perfect small-town vibe in a big city; it’s the perfect mix. We knew we wanted to stay here for at least a few years. We looked at house prices and went, “This is ridiculous, this is about a third of the price of a house in Sydney” which we’d never be able to afford – so we immediately bought a house and have committed to staying here. We’re hoping we can convince our loved ones to come here, too. You can go for a bike ride in South Australia any weekend and you’re guaranteed to see some sort of festival – there’s so much going on, you can’t possibly keep up.

Bec Williams is a cyber security adviser with Comunet. Picture: Russell Millard

I worked at KPMG in Adelaide as a senior cyber consultant for just under two years, before moving to Comunet as a cyber security adviser in mid-2021. Comunet is located within the Australian Cyber Collaboration Centre at Lot Fourteen. It’s great because you have people from all different occupations with different backgrounds. Some have worked their whole lives in PR, engineering or hospitality and now they’re working in cyber. They’re bringing different perspectives but also different information from their old workplaces: having it all together, you can talk about things and get new perspectives and ideas.

It’s so cool to find out what’s happening out there because there are things you don’t think of or could even imagine to be real: these businesses in the collaboration space at A3C are saying, “Yep, this is the tool we’re creating and it’s going to make everyone’s life so much easier” and you think, “Wow, that’s amazing, thank you for sharing that”. It’s such a cool environment.

You can do so much within cyber. I have pigeonholed myself a little bit into governance, risk and compliance but there’s no reason why I can’t do training and branch out because there are so many different areas of cyber. Plus, it’s still growing. With the State Government’s intention of trying to make us the cyber hub for Australia, there will be countless new roles and specialist jobs created.

I think that, no matter what I want to do, I can always find an opportunity here, whether it’s in leadership or management or doing my own thing independently – it’s impossible to be bored in cyber.