Job opportunities in the cybersecurity field

Let’s take a specific look at higher education programs for Information Technology and the related cybersecurity discipline. For starters, they can’t graduate students fast enough to fill the existing job openings in the cybersecurity field. Even before the pandemic, there was a well-documented talent gap between the growing number of open cybersecurity jobs and skilled applicants to fill them. In November 2019, ISC2 calculated that the cyber workforce would need to increase by more than 145% to fill gaps in talent across the U.S. Cyberseek.org tracks this unique employment landscape and states that “the average cybersecurity role takes 20% longer to fill than other IT jobs in the U.S.” because employers struggle to find workers with cybersecurity-related skills.

The dynamics of this gap have probably gotten worse. Today’s stay-at-home world has cybersecurity vulnerability written all over it. Online activities have exploded with remote work access, distance learning, telemedicine, video conferencing, online shopping, gaming, media streaming, and more all happening at once….and creating a world of opportunity for threats to identity, systems and data. And, in the post-pandemic world that we are looking forward to, many of the new and unexpectedly ‘proven’ activities like distance learning and telemedicine will likely stay with us to some extent as part of the ‘new norm’.

The result is that behind the physical coronavirus crises is the shadow of a virtual cyber virus crisis. And it means that cybersecurity is quickly moving to the frontlines of mission-critical skillsets for healthcare, higher education, retail, and every employer that enabled work-from-home for the safety of their workforce. Now, more than ever, organizations and institutions need to stop thinking in terms of IF they are breached and start planning in terms of WHEN they are breached.

Does that sound ominous? It is! But buried in the dramatic shortage of cyber skills, is opportunity. Opportunity for STEM/IT focused students (high school and collegiate) to specialize in cybersecurity and find jobs upon graduation. And opportunity for higher education institutions to ramp up their cybersecurity program enrollment.

• In March 2019, Cyber Crime Magazine reported that only 3% of U.S. Bachelor’s Degree graduates had a skill set in cybersecurity.
• And in another 2019 report, Burning Tree Technologies learned that while federal data showed the number of postsecondary programs in key cybersecurity areas had increased 33%, the ratio of currently employed cybersecurity workers to job openings, had hardly budged since 2015. In other words, the pool of available talent has remained proportionally the same.

Developing the cybersecurity skills that employers are desperate for is a multi-faceted challenge. Employers want to bring in new hires who have both a strong foundation in basic security principles and concepts as well as practical job role specific skills like networking protocols, scripting, regular expressions, kill chain and network defense, etc. And maybe most importantly, employers categorize top talent as those applicants with power skills like strategic thinking, problem-solving, teamwork and collaboration.