A Window Into Our Industry

Hi everybody. This is Ian Glaser. I'm the co-founder of ID pro. I'm also SGP of product management at Salesforce, where I look after our identity services. And I really wanna start with, thanks. Thank you for having me here. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to EIC. It sounds like it's been really great so far and it'll be a great week. I miss all of you around the world and in the room and I wish I was there and next year that'll happen. But thanks so much for your time. So before I talk about providing a window into our industry, I wanna talk a little bit about ID pro itself. So we have had the good fortune of sort of announcing ID pro at EIC years ago, but it's a professional association, the professional association for identity management globally. And it's really about fostering excellence.
Now we've been around almost six years. Now we have 200 individual members, 30 organizations that then bring another 600 members to it. So total of 800 members we've been growing year over year. And so we have a really vibrant community. We have, as part of our charter been building a body of knowledge. This is something clearly we hear from the industry, not just our members, but all of the industry that they're looking for, vendor neutral training. And that body of knowledge is that we have produced five issues with one more coming shortly over 25 articles and over 50 authors and contributors. There's still a lot of room and a lot of things we can do with the body of knowledge. So if you're interested in writing an article, you can go to ID pro.org/body of knowledge, and actually see the topic areas where we need contribution, where you can write something.
Similarly, every time we publish an article, every time we publish an an issue, we actually post it on GitHub as well. So people can comment and we actually go through an update process every year of accommodating and listening to the comments we get and making improvements and last, but by no means, least there are opportunities to translate the body of knowledge and an enormous shout out to the family ID pro family in Japan who created ID pro JP, and I've actually started the translation work. It's amazing. Now I mentioned that we have a new issue coming out and there are some amazing articles coming out. Some of these are ones that we're shocked that people are excited to write about, and we are so great grateful that they are, for example, writing about public key infrastructure and the implications for identity professionals. It's gonna be amazing article from Robert, but these are just some of the things that you can expect in not just issue six coming this month, but issue seven and beyond now, as promised I wanted to talk about our industry and the way I wanna do that is through the lens of the skills survey that ID pro has been running.
For many years, we have been running a skills and program survey to get a sense for where are the major trends in the industry, not just from technology, but the needs of our practitioners this year is no different. Now it is an anonymous survey. We use survey monkey to conducted. We solicit feedback. We solicit response from both members and non-members that we had over 250 this year, the first area where we ask questions is around sort of demographics and skills. So we see this year more participation from places around the world, not just north America. This is very important to me. We're showing that we're growing our reach as an industry and an organization. We also ask what industry do you come from? And we have an interesting blend of organization types that are participating in terms of, in the industry and where we see representation.
And we also ask for your employer, how big is your employer? And we are a little bit heavy weighted, I would say towards the very large organizations, more than 10,000 people. And then next is the smaller organization, zero to 500. And you should keep this in mind. As you see the results you may think to yourself, you know what large organizations may find this topic more interesting than another. So there may not be some surprises when you consider the response we have from different size organizations. And we ask, how long have you been working in identity? Now the majority of our respondents have been working in the industry over 10 years, and that's not necessarily surprising giving the way ID pro has come about and the organizations and the events that we work at. But one of the things that's changed over years is seeing more participation from people that in this survey that haven't been in the industry quite as long. So we ask a question about, of all the areas and identity management, and obviously there's many where have you had experience and just pick all the ones that apply MFA, user provisioning, role management. They have been dominant over the years. We all share that in a lot of ways. We've seen some changes in this makeup, however, and I'm gonna talk about the implications in just a little bit.
We ask a question that is in some degree controversial, which is how long did it take you to feel proficient? No, no, no, not be proficient as an identity professional, but feel proficient. And the majority of people say the respondents say somewhere between two and 10 years, my guess is it's probably around eight. But the responses that I love that I am one of is that 25% that says I still don't feel proficient to me. This is an indication that our industry is growing. That there's always something new to learn. There's always new areas to have mastery. There's always new places to demonstrate our expertise to the business. I love the fact that people still don't feel proficient because it means all of us have a vibrant place to grow together. And we ask which technical and non-technical skills have been of most used to you.
And we can say now, after having three plus years of data, these are the big three that are consistent from a technical perspective system architecture, cyber security, and programming from a non-technical perspective, lateral thinking, adaptability and working in teams. This shouldn't come as a surprise to you, but this is, this is our world and the skill sets we need to lay a strong foundation. And we also ask what would've been really useful for you to receive, to be more successful in your career. Overwhelmingly people are looking for mentorship, but close on its heels, the need for vent vendor, neutral training material, and peer-to-peer networking followed by certification. So there's actually been some interesting changes in these responses, which I'll touch on in just a moment. And one of the things that is interesting year over year is we saw a market decrease in people that are interested in presenting at events versus the need for peer-to-peer marketing. We've seen a two X increase in the desire for peer-to-peer networking, excuse me. And I think this is an implication of COVID.
We also ask to the respondents, what are important priorities for both you, in terms of areas you wanna learn about inside of the identity industry, as well as what are priorities for the enterprises, with which you work now, we've been collecting this information over years and now can actually show you some trend from the enterprise perspective. Essentially what you see here are our respondents saying, I believe that these are areas that are important to the organizations I work with over the next 18 months, MFA C a I a being the top three, and they've moved around a little bit, but those are the big three. And then you can see some of the others, which are in some regards, very traditional identity management access and access needs, but contrast the priorities for the organization versus the areas that individuals are interested in learning about. Now, Ida is number one, but notice things look really different than what the enterprises are saying.
Self-sovereign identity standards, proving identity for I O T to me, this is a reflection of that. I still don't feel proficient. These are all these areas that you could learn about that you could grow within, and they don't always match up to what the enterprise wants. Now, what's interesting is that misma, in some places we see areas of interest for the individual like self-sovereign identity that are far less of a priority for organizations. And sometimes they're actually evenly matched, like say API protection, or it shifts the other way. Enterprises are really prioritizing MFA, but you know, 75% of us have experience in MFA. And it's not necessarily that interesting a as a growth area for a majority of our respondents. So this mismatch can point to some really interesting things we're seeing in the industry.
We added a new section to the survey this year, one specifically about diversity and inclusion. And I think the reason is summed up well by our good friend, David Lee, and this quote from him that while I think many of us had a shared sort of hint of what we think the organ, the enterprise looks like, excuse me, the industry looks like in terms of diversity, in terms of inclusion, no one had actually asked, we hadn't gathered this information before. So we did this year. This is the first time to the best of our knowledge that anyone's conducted this kind of survey. Some of the results are not going to be very surprising in terms of the respondents that were overwhelmingly identified as male and overwhelmingly identified as heterosexual. We also asked questions about inclusivity and hiring practices. So we asked the organization that you were working with.
Do you think it's dedicated towards diversity? Do you think it's dedicated towards inclusion? And then do you hire from diverse backgrounds and the overwhelming response, whether agree or strongly agree is that yes, organizations are dedicated to these classes. They are hiring from these kinds of diverse schools. Now think back a second. Remember I mentioned that of the respondents. We had a, nearly a majority from larger organizations, a hypothesis here is that companies like Microsoft and AWS and Salesforce, these kinds of issues are top priorities for them. And they have resources to invest and they are investing.
We also asked how important is diversity to you as an individual. And I am very heartened by the responses. Now it may not be the top priority for everyone, but it is very important to the majority of our respondents. And I think that reflects well on us as an industry. And we also asked a question about belonging. Do you feel like you belong at the organization where you're working and here, the overwhelming majority says they either agree or strongly agree. And this is important to me at a personal level, because the sense of belonging was something that I wanted to bring to everyone for this industry. I have had such a wonderful experience interacting with people from all around the world. I really felt like this industry was a place I could belong to, and I felt a real strong sense of that. And in some regards, founding ID pro was to help extend that to everyone, find ways to connect people so that they too could find that place to belong.
Now, there are a couple of takeaways. As we looked across the data that I wanted to share with you, the first is C's impact on our industry. MFA continues to remain a top priority for enterprise. Now we conducted this survey last year in the March, April timeframe, the beginning of lockdown. And so the hypothesis was organizations are saying, look, we have a work from anywhere world. Now we are gonna try to move towards zero trust. One of the most important and effective and relatively easy things we can do is roll out MFA. And I think this has been met out by the data that Siam is now. The second highest enterprise priority is not necessarily surprising if we're work from anywhere. It means we're engaging with our customers anywhere. That means that every organization has got to implement or revisit its digital transformation strategy. And as we all know, C IAM is critical.
If you wanna actually have digital engagement. And then lastly, from a technology perspective, the fact that Ida is remaining in the top three sort of enterprise interest to me, continues to indicate that organizations are saying, I need more. It agility, especially trying to accommodate a work from anywhere workforce. Now that's the technology trends. But similarly, we saw an interesting trend around the needs of our practitioners, the needs of the respondent saying, I need more ways to interact peer to peer. This should not be surprising. We have all been trapped at home and that need for human connection in an area that we belong is so critical. We also have seen an interesting implication of the Dunning Kruger effect, which says essentially that you will overstate skills that you may not have. And you will understate skills that you do have so interesting to compare our member versus non-member responses.
When they said how that long it took them to feel proficient. Non-members 15% of them said zero to two years. I felt proficient. Whereas members said, no only 2% of us felt that way. Similarly, 30% of our members say they don't feel proficient still versus 21% of non-members the heck is going on here. My hypothesis is this, that ID pro members have this community they can interact with. And they can see people of all expertise from around the world, in every industry asking questions, posing problems. And I think that provides a very simple way to realize how big and broad identity management is and how deep it can be, how much more there is to learn, and non-members may not get that experience. And so that kind of leads to the outcomes we're seeing here.
The other thing we see is an interesting responses. We saw someone previously around the mismatch between enterprise priority, for things like SSI or blockchain technologies and the individual interest level enterprises are less interested. Individuals are far more interested in digging in, but I think what's happening is really hiding in the identity proofing area. We're seeing an interest from both individuals and enterprises around identity proofing. Keep in mind, we did not have a choice for a verified credentials this year. And so we'll add that as an area, but I think what we're seeing here is an interest on the outcomes. Essentially enterprises and individuals are acknowledging, we need more verified identities. We need higher assurance ID. We need to reduce the friction in the proofing process and that's the outcome they wanna see, but they're mixed in terms of the implementation of how we should get there. And I think that's really interesting and it sets us up for some interesting conversations over the next couple of years.
Lastly, and I know what you're saying, I'm sure Martin, you're already getting up to ask a question, which is here comes Ian, he's gonna kill off another part of identity management. Where does he get off doing this? So here's the thing we have over the last couple of years, seen that as an organizational priority and an individual priority directories, including after directory was not a highly voted area of interest, to be clear. Those two things alone are not a reason to say we have the death of directories ahead of us. But adding this in starts to 65% of a respondent said that directories were an area that they had expertise that's down five basis points from last year, we are seeing a smaller workforce who has had experience in directories. Now you couple that with low organizational and personal prioritization of this technology area and what I think we're starting to see the beginning of is that we have a smaller workforce who can work with directories and non-growing interest in doing so. Now this very well may lead to opportunity, especially those of you who are directory experts. You may be employed for life. Congratulations.
Now, if that was a window into our industry, there's one more window we need to peer into, which is a window into our own achievements. One of the ways you can do this is by telling others based on a third party that I have achieved something. And I am thrilled to announce today. The CID pro the certified identity professional certification from ID pro. This is the first vendor neutral certification that was built for identity professionals by identity professionals. Now the CID pro exam, we are targeting someone who's had two years of experience in, I, I am, full-time, it'll have 150 questions. It's a three hour currently online proctored exam, but in the future, you'll be able to do this in person. And the registration fee is 750 us dollars. It looks into five areas that we feel are foundational or fundamental for identity management, basically the elements of a system or an identity solution aspects around identifiers and life cycle. How you secure the security implications for identity, what are rules and standards that are relevant to us? And then what are the operational considerations for running an identity management system?
Yeah. So, em, em, maybe a quick reminder if you currently could be a little conscious of time.
Yep. I have two more slides and I'm out.
Okay. And you're two minutes up over. Okay, cool. Okay.
So here is the amazing set of people that built this certification. And if you could put them together in a consulting firm, they'd be pretty darn amazing, but they came together to write the questions for the exam. So you can register today, ID pro.org/cid pro, and I really encourage you to do so because it's a way to present a window into your achievements. It's a way to get your team certified and show their achievements. And this is how we actually start to really professionalize the industry. Thank you so far and much.