# Boyd Clewis

Boyd Clewis teaches people how to enter cybersecurity and build tech careers, drawing on experience solving security problems inside companies. His advice covers hands-on learning, nontechnical routes into security, and helping businesses meet security needs without blocking progress.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/boyd-clewis/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boydclewis
- LinkedIn followers: 41,012
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmTS2gGo4gjZLt8LxVnF3XA
- Topics: cybersecurity
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-05

## Summary

Boyd Clewis is most useful for career advice on entering cybersecurity and enabling business security.

- Best for: A cybersecurity training company running entry-level or career-transition content and webinars.
- Not for: A security tooling vendor needing scripted product demos for senior detection engineers.
- Check first: Confirm deliverables, exclusivity, usage rights, timing, price, and recent webinar results.

### Takeaways

- Security should enable the business, not block it.
- Cybersecurity is not only technical work; career changers should not be discouraged.
- Security teams also need project managers, policy writers, data analysts, and compliance officers.

## Main ideas

- **Security should enable the business, not block it**: Boyd Clewis argues that security professionals need to understand what a company does: their job is to make initiatives safe, not say no. In an early security role, shutting down coworkers' ideas on security grounds led people to route around them and cast them as an obstacle to progress. Later, with a clearer grasp of the company's priorities, they changed their approach: agree first, then find a secure way to proceed. They call this business enablement and say it built trust and made them more valuable.
- **Cybersecurity is not only technical work; career changers should not be discouraged**: Boyd Clewis challenges the belief that cybersecurity requires a technical background or a prescribed list of certifications. They also criticize professionals who respond to career-change questions with nothing but certification recommendations. The field includes many nontechnical functions: project and people management, writing and reviewing policy, data analysis, collecting and reviewing evidence before an assessment, and tracking remediation plans. Their advice is to understand a person's transferable skills before offering guidance, rather than undermine someone's confidence in a field with many entry paths.
- **Get hands-on experience where you already work**: For people aiming for tech or cybersecurity roles, Boyd Clewis recommends shadowing or volunteering at their current employer before jumping to a new company. Shadowing shows whether a role is a genuine fit before they commit, and an internal pivot is smoother at a company that already knows them. Clewis says being upfront with leadership about wanting to learn can even lead to a position being created, as it did for them. They call the on-the-job learning expectation getting paid to learn, but stress that people must first demonstrate commitment through online training or a certification before approaching leadership.
- **Document the work and turn fixes into systems**: In a career retrospective, Boyd Clewis traces the turning point to a mindset shift: moving from fixing isolated problems to spotting patterns, documenting solutions, and building systems and processes to stop the same problems recurring. Their advice to their younger self: document everything, take on more than you are asked to, and pursue problems worth solving rather than titles. They credit that approach with leading to a business at 33, global speaking, mentoring, building tools, and working with large companies.
- **Put yourself in rooms where you are not the most accomplished person**: Boyd Clewis treats being unrecognized as useful. At a creators' conference, they had roughly 340,000 YouTube subscribers but were surrounded by people with audiences in the millions. Nobody knew who they were, and they say they hope it happens again: anonymity let them focus on learning, ask better questions, and see the room expand what they believed possible. Their principle is to learn from people ahead of you while helping those behind you. They warn that if you are always the most accomplished person in the room, it may be protecting your ego instead of expanding your thinking.

## Work to read

- [Gaining Hands-on Experience in Cybersecurity](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/boydclewis_if-youre-aiming-to-break-into-the-tech-industry-activity-7510727916859854848-tOqC)
- [Business Enablement in Security Architecture](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/boydclewis_once-you-understand-your-role-in-the-company-activity-7511784357620101120-5gZ1)
- [Expanding Pathways Beyond Technical Cybersecurity Roles](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/boydclewis_why-do-so-many-people-find-it-impossible-activity-7508903333735092224-gUk7)
- [Resilience and Strategic Growth in High-Achieving Tech Careers](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/boydclewis_im-39-i-got-arrested-at-19-i-failed-out-activity-7511477041746075648-1Q8u)
- [The Importance of Continuous Learning in Global Tech Communities](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/boydclewis_i-have-almost-340-youtube-subscribers-activity-7512930643111059457-_6dX)

## Brand relationships

- **American Airlines** (employment)
- **Forage** (mention)

## Partnerships

Boyd Clewis's posts offer no sponsorship programme, media kit, rate card, or published partner terms. Their commercial content centers on their own services and recommendations: one post invites IT professionals seeking mentorship for their consulting businesses to message them directly, while another names Forage's job-simulation exercises as a free starting point for people moving into security—a recommendation, not a disclosed paid placement. They also say they have spoken on global stages, without specifying an event series, package, deliverables, or requirements. Their post about attending VidSummit, a creator conference, frames it as a learning experience rather than a booked engagement. For a cybersecurity training company considering a webinar and content partnership, ask them to specify format, deliverables, exclusivity, usage rights, timing, and price.

## Alternatives

- Melvin Williams: Choose Melvin Williams when the webinar or content series needs a build-along demonstration rather than a talking-head explanation of how to break into security. Two posts document a phase-by-phase Active Directory home lab: creating departmental security groups such as GS_IT_Staff and GS_HR_Staff, moving from per-user permissions to role-based access control, delegating local administrator rights on a workstation without granting domain admin, and verifying the result. Each post asks the audience what to tackle next — Group Policy restrictions or NTFS file permissions — giving a training partner a ready discussion hook and a lab sequence to split into modules. For an entry-level IT or service-desk audience, this shows the day-to-day work more concretely than career-advice posts do.
- Kyser Clark: Choose Kyser Clark when the deliverable is a podcast or video conversation rather than a written guide, or when the programme wants the certification question argued from the other side. The posts promote episodes of The Hacker's Cache: one explains why attending only two conference talks and spending the time networking paid off; the other argues that holding 19 certifications did not automatically produce better pay, better opportunities or a healthier career, and that hands-on experience and avoiding burnout matter more. The second post offers a ready-made counterpoint for a session on what certifications can and cannot do. The interview format and conference-community angle suit a co-hosted audio or video partnership.
- Kishor Rao: Choose Kishor Rao when the audience is career changers aiming at customer-facing technical roles rather than hands-on security engineering, or when a session needs a story about handling a live incident. The posts trace a path from developer to professional services to QA management and back into customer-facing work as a technical account manager. They describe an outage in which the account's usual engineer was on leave, communication with stakeholders mattered more than having an answer yet, and a root cause analysis closed the loop. For a programme covering account management, customer success or support escalation, that is closer to the actual job than generic advice about entering security.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/