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U.S. Cybersecurity Job Market Cries for Help as Demand for Top Talent Soars

Employer demand for cybersecurity professionals across the United State continues is soaring, according to new data sourced by Burning Glass Technologies. While the U.S. houses hundreds of thousands of cybersecurity workers, there are still plenty of chairs to fill in IT departments across the nation.

U.S. employers in the private and public sectors posted an estimated 313,735 job openings for cybersecurity workers between September 2017 and August 2018, according to the job market analytics firm. Considering the number of people residing in the U.S, that may sound like a fair number of openings in the cybersecurity sector. However, the figure stacks against an additional 715,000-plus cybersecurity workers currently employed around the country. That makes a total of 1,028,735 available jobs in cybersecurity. With the United States housing 325.7 million people as of 2017, we can calculate that the U.S. market has room for 0.31% of the country’s population solely in cybersecurity.

The study was commissioned by CyberSeek, which provides data about supply and demand in the cybersecurity realm. Among specific core jobs, the top five by employer demand are:

  • cybersecurity engineer
  • cybersecurity analyst
  • cybersecurity manager/administrator
  • cybersecurity consultant and
  • penetration and vulnerability tester

The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has the largest number of job openings for cybersecurity professionals (44,058). The top five metro areas are New York City (20,243), Dallas (12,062), Chicago (11,201), and Los Angeles (10,589), researchers found. And the average salaries for core cybersecurity jobs range from $75,000 for a cybersecurity specialist/technician to $129,000 for a cybersecurity architect.

Across all occupations, there are 5.8 employed workers for every job opening, the research shows. However, in the cybersecurity sector, the ratio of existing cybersecurity workers to the number of cybersecurity job openings is 2.3, indicating that the cybersecurity job market is comparatively tightened, with few opportunities to “poach” workers from other companies.

Researchers asked experts to interpret the numbers. Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), obliged, saying:

“Efforts to address the shortage of cybersecurity workers are underway on many fronts, but progress has been frustratingly slow. The threats are real and growing, with the potential to impact the livelihood of any organization. Our current cybersecurity workforce is doing what it can to keep us protected. It’s critical for private sector companies and public sector agencies to take the actions necessary to bring more people into the cybersecurity workforce, and to equip them with the appropriate education, training and certifications.”

Resource-constrained security teams are increasingly trying to manage large volumes of security alerts with disparate, marginally integrated solutions. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions are aimed at bridging the cybersecurity talent gap by offering a single, homogeneous solution with integrated workflows and advanced forensics. The best EDR solutions offer pre- and post-compromise forensics, intelligent scoring of suspicious activity, attack-technique visualization, real-time Indicators-of-Compromise (IoC), and automated resolution, all from within a single-pane platform. The advanced prevention capabilities built inside EDR solutions limit the number of incidents requiring manual analysis, and ultimately eliminate the need for hiring additional IT staff.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Business Insights In Virtualization and Cloud Security authored by Filip Truta. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BusinessInsightsInVirtualizationAndCloudSecurity/~3/nvecpXE3wDo/u.s.-cybersecurity-job-market-cries-for-help-as-demand-for-top-talent-soars