Closing The Cybersecurity Skills Gap

Cybersecurity Skills Gap-America is facing an unprecedented mismatch in the supply of and demand for talent. In a robust economy, over 40% of college graduates are still underemployed in their first job. And we know that if they’re underemployed in their first job, 2/3 of the time they’ll be underemployed five years later, and half the time they’ll be underemployed ten years later. Even worse, tens of millions of older workers are out-of-position relative to the skills required by employers. And on the demand side of the equation, there are over 7 million unfilled jobs, most of which are high skill or middle skill positions. The labor market isn’t working very well.

The skills gap is exacting a heavy toll on American families and institutions. It is impeding economic growth, promoting generational inequity, jeopardizing the American Dream, and creating real anxiety about the future of work.

Why is the skills gap worse than ever? Largely due to technology. Through my investments in technology staffing companies, I have seen the data firsthand: thousands of job requisitions sent to staffing firms where average fill rates may be no higher than 20%. The vast majority of these positions are jobs that–if not formally “IT jobs,” require discrete digital skills–which is consistent with reports that we’re seeing near-zero job growth in what’s supposed to be our most dynamic industry. According to the TechServe Alliance, the national trade association of technology staffing and services companies, IT employment is basically flat. TechServe lays the blame entirely on the supply of technical talent: “the rate of growth remains anemic due to an acute talent shortage.”

America’s skills gap remains primarily a technical or digital skills gap–not general, but rather specialized across thousands of specific technologies, some of which haven’t even been around for a year. For example, we don’t have a shortage of C++ or Fortran coders, although there’s huge unmet demand for J2EE, Microservices, and .NET developers.

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Article Credit: Forbes