It’s no secret that cybersecurity is suffering from a dire talent shortage. It’s also not resolvable the way the industry is currently operating.
For a long time, cybersecurity has been viewed as an IT function and a nice-to-have and only attracted a niche group of technical talent (engineers) that only the largest companies could afford to hire. While cybersecurity is picking up traction in conversations outside of IT because of the rise in ransomware and cloud adoption, the skills gap remains.
There are currently 500,000 cybersecurity job openings. The entry-level base salaries are between $60,000 to $90,000, and we can barely fill half of them.
Why?
- Lack of Awareness
With the mass exodus to the cloud and shifts to SaaS during the pandemic, companies are starting to regard cybersecurity as a genuine business need and not a nice-to-have. However, it may take some more time to get students and young people up to speed around thinking of cybersecurity as a career. Most college graduates don’t consider cybersecurity when choosing a field because it’s highly technical, and technical graduates tend to lean toward software engineering.
- Lack of Desire
Only a minuscule portion of the job is as enticing and attractive as television shows or big production action movies make it out to be. Most of the job involves hours of data plumbing and using complex tools that require technical expertise and years of training. The jobs are less investigative than they are about wrangling data, configuring it, and cleaning it up to make any sense of it.
- Lack of Skills
The technical skills it takes to understand the current tools on the market are few and far between. Few people understand the new cloud and SaaS world we’re moving to. It takes a lot of technical expertise to triangulate signals, and there are not enough data scientists out there to solve analytics problems.
The ransomware problem will go from bad to worse because while cybersecurity talent hires are expensive (and sparse), it costs very little to be a hacker. In fact, in other parts of the world, hacking is acceptable and sometimes even celebrated. Hence, a lot of these elusive cybercriminal groups are believed to be nation-states targeting the US.
To thwart these attacks, we urgently need to normalize the conversation around cybersecurity to build awareness and foster a desire to join the industry.
How do we close the gap?
Software and automation play a crucial role in resolving the talent shortage.
When machines create better interfaces for less technical people, the industry will be able to diversify the pool by hiring more women and people of various backgrounds. We want to harness skills that are unique to humans, such as problem-solving and critical thinking. Automated and turn-key intelligence solutions would enable humans to exercise these capabilities by taking care of data modeling, correlating data, and driving insights from data swamps.
On the recruitment side, we need an industry-wide initiative to onboard people from various schools around the country, retool people in different fields, and train critical thinkers who don’t have technical degrees.
With the proper certifications and mentorship, somebody out of high school can secure a lower-level analyst role and learn from the ground up. Then, we can build awareness and desire by educating folks on cybersecurity and how it is a lucrative, growing career that the next generation wants to be a part of.
Tune in to a conversation with Fletch’s CEO and Founder, Grant Wernick, for more information around the cybersecurity talent gap.
If you are interested in learning more about how Fletch can resolve the talent shortage, please contact us at uba@fletch.ai or sign up for a demo on our website.
