In any employment market there are going to be jobs in high demand and those that go unfilled. In our tech driven economy, the jobs that are hard to recruit for range from utility lineman (long hours, hard work, and fabulous pay) and, strangely enough, cyber security. With all of the hype and news around hacking, I was surprised to learn that these $80k/year jobs are readily available. But why?
From a selection standpoint, good cyber security engineers need an odd combination of skills. Of course they need to be great programmers with high levels of critical thinking. However, they often need to have a criminal’s mindset (“How would I get into this system without someone knowing?”), which makes them a risky hire given their access to sensitive data. And makes them attractive on the black market.
The incentives for prevention jobs are also difficult. After all, they are performing well when nothing goes wrong. But, when someone breaks into the system…
This is an opportunity for industry and universities to work together. College students want tech jobs (sorry to those of you who recruit linemen), but they tend to want to work in the sexier product/app development area. Tech companies can show higher education how to make the field more “fun,” perhaps through gamification and appealing to the cat-and-mouse aspect of the work.
My sense is that they pay for these jobs will also need to rise to fill them. If it is true that good cyber security engineers have good hacking skills, there needs to be a sense of doing the right thing pays at least almost as well as breaking into systems.
What we see is that even tech companies need to be thinking about how to get future workers trained and recruited for jobs that are not that appealing. As our economy constantly evolves, companies will still need “legacy” employees (yes, some day, app development will be boring compared to what is hot then). And it is possible that the cycle of job obsolescence will become shorter. This makes the challenge for schools to provide the skills to future employees even greater. Industry and education will both benefit if they work together in that venture. I just hope in the meantime no one has hacked my blog.