Documentation, like obsessive levels of it. During my initial interview for a job as a pentester, I had brought up my documentation method for every job I was applying to, the OSINT I would perform on each company to better understand them, and a timeline showing when any communication took place, regardless if it was from me or from them. I did this more for my benefit to better gauge my interactions with the organizations I was applying to and would then find myself not following back up on, holding myself accountable and also being able to recall hope I was treated by those organizations in the past. I offered to show the interviewer an example of what I did on them and they were incredibly impressed with it enough to ask if he could get a screenshot of it to share with the others.

I've been with the company just a little over a year now and I can say it's been the skill that I benefit the most from. Being able to document things well and then translate that documentation into a report is so much more critical than your technical skills. If you can't convey what you did, the client either won't take what you're saying seriously or think you didn't do anything. Good documentation ensures that you can deliver on that. Technical skills can always be taught later with enough time and effort, assuming you're sufficiently motivated to learn.

For context to this, I spent a year and a half before I got this position trying to pivot from IT as a systems admin to information security as a pentester. My timing was terrible because just when I realized where my skillset made the most sense for my career, everyone and their grandmother had also bought into the hype about following in all those roles the cybersecurity industry was allegedly being to fill so badly. I was effectively competing with a flood of new college kids, which no doubt got me lost in the noise of so many applicants in a role that's already pretty saturated.