Cybersecurity Jobs Millions of Openings
Over an eight year period tracked by Cybersecurity Ventures, the number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs grew by 350 percent, from one million positions in 2013 to 3.5 million in 2021. Cybersecurity Ventures’ prediction that there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs globally by 2022, up from one million positions in 2014.
In the USA the cybersecurity workforce has more than 950,000 workers with around 465,000 of them yet to be filled, according to CyberSeek, a project supported by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Nationwide, there are just over 90,000 CISSPs (Certified Information Systems Security Professionals), according to CyberSeek, but more than 106,000 job openings require the CISSP certification, our industry’s gold standard. Or consider CISMs (Certified Information Security Managers), with just 17,000 people holding the credentials but nearly 40,000 advertised jobs requesting them.
Microsoft with the U.S. community colleges to help place 250,000 people into the cybersecurity workforce by 2025, representing half of the country’s labor shortage. Google is running a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal that says they’re training 100,000 Americans for vital jobs in data privacy and security.
Code.org joined Microsoft, Google, IBM, Apple, and Amazon at the White House recently and committed to teaching cybersecurity concepts to three million students. This includes two million K-12 students across 35,000 classrooms over the next three years, and the launch of a new instructional cybersecurity video series with a goal of reaching one million students of all ages. 45 percent of Code.org students are young women, and 49 percent are from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.
Roy Zur, CEO, ThriveDX SaaS on Cybersecurity Jobs
Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that women will represent 30 percent of the global cybersecurity workforce by 2025, and that will reach 35 percent by 2031.