After the CISO Chair: How Cybersecurity Leaders Shape Their Next Executive Act

Why the skills you build as a CISO — not the title — determine whether your future is CIO, CTO, COO, or the private equity and venture capital table

For a long time, the CISO role was treated as the end of the line. You grind your way up through security engineering, incident response, compliance, and governance, and once you land the CISO title, that’s it — you’ve “made it.” That thinking is obsolete. Research from executive search firms, board advisory groups, and private equity operators over the last five years shows that the CISO role has quietly become one of the most versatile feeder roles in the enterprise.

What comes next, however, is not determined by the title itself but by the skills the CISO built while holding it. In other words, the CISO job is no longer a destination; it’s a sorting mechanism.

Take the CIO path. CISOs who move into CIO roles tend to be the ones who never treated security as a silo. They lived in ERP conversations, cloud migrations, identity platforms, data architecture, and uptime metrics. Their boards already trusted them with enterprise-wide tradeoffs, not just cyber risk. A clear example is Tim Callahan, who moved from the CISO role into the CIO seat at Aflac. That transition only works when the CISO has already been acting as a technology integrator, balancing cost, reliability, and speed rather than as a control enforcer.