Careers are never a straight line,” shares Richard Weiss, who went from engineer to IT to information security before landing his first C-suite role at AccentCare as vice president and chief information security officer (CISO). “It’s a lot of hard work, and there were a lot of roles between that first one and this, where eighty- to one hundred-hour weeks were not uncommon.”
He’s learned that in a career progression, it’s important to set expectations correctly on what it will take to get there and then do the work to land where you want to be.
Born and raised in New York, Weiss’s father bought him his first computer—an Intel 8088—at eight years old. He instantly felt a connection and knew he would be doing something with them in the future. Upon moving to Arizona after high school, he enrolled in a trade school that exposed him to more Microsoft classes, and he learned a great deal more about computer science.
Later in his career, he went back to college where he graduated from University of North Texas with a Bachelor of Science, with a focus on information management and health informatics.
