Next week is Thanksgiving and though I won’t be eating turkey or loading up on mashed potatoes, I will be having a piece of pie. Stay with me on this one.
It’s not just that I haven’t met a pie I haven’t liked. After all, who can resist key lime pie in Miami – I had a piece at @PureVerdeLounge when I was at the CAE Symposium last week – or homemade pumpkin pie with a dollop of freshly whipped heavy cream?
Yes, there’s a point to all this talk of pie. I like the phrase “no matter how you slice the pie (fill in the blank)”.
In this case, no matter how you slice the pie, today as I write this and in the next five plus years, maybe even a decade or more, there will be a shortage of cybersecurity professionals. The industry will have a critical need for qualified individuals interested in protecting data and assets for private and public organizations.
The predictions are dire. Just look at some of the figures cited by Cybersecurity Ventures earlier this year in an article about The Cybersecurity Jobs Report sponsored by @HerjavecGroup.
“We predict there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity positions by 2021.”
- Cybercrime is predicted to cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015.
- The 2014 Cisco Annual Security Report estimated by 2014, the industry will still be short more than a million security professionals.
- In 2015, Symantec expected the demand for cybersecurity talent would rise to 6 million globally by 2019, with a projected shortfall of 1.5 million.
- A 2016 skills gap analysis from ISACA estimated a global shortage of 2 million cybersecurity professionals by 2019, according to the UK House of Lords Digital Skills Committee.
- The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) recently estimated that India will need 1 million cybersecurity professionals by 2020 to meet the demands of its rapidly growing economy.
What I see is opportunity. Upskill if you are in a related field or reskill if you are in another field or line of work. I’ve heard more than a few times that as technologies like artificial intelligence become the norm, we won’t need workers. I’ve also heard that we shouldn’t worry because humans will be the curators of these new technologies. I tend to agree with the latter prediction, mainly because I know there are vulnerabilities and risks associated with IoT devices. I also know there is and will continue to be a need to safeguard critical infrastructure against attacks.
Remember the pie? Well, no matter how you slice it, cybersecurity needs skilled professionals. Why not apply?
Oh, and if you have a piece of apple crumb pie you’d like to share, let me know. All this talk about pie has made me really hungry.