Report: 80% of IT Security Pros Think the Skills Gap Has Worsened Since 2017

The U.S. government had its longest government shutdown in history between 22 December 2018 and 25 January 2019. It’s not yet clear what overall impact this closure had on U.S. digital security. In the short term, a SecurityScorecard report found that federal agencies’ network security ratings slightly declined but that both their endpoint security and patching cadence scores increased during the closure. Potential long-term consequences are even more uncertain, though Fifth Domain and others have speculated that the shutdown will likely affect federal agencies’ ability to hire skilled digital security talent going forward.

This prediction is concerning given the fact that the digital security skills gap continues to worsen across all sectors. In October 2018, for example, (ISC)2 published research revealing that the shortage of security professionals totaled 2.93 million positions around the globe, with 500,000 unfilled jobs based in North America alone. ESG conducted a study of its own shortly thereafter and found that 53 percent of organizations reported challenges with hiring skilled digital security professionals. That’s the third year in a row that this rate has grown.

Given this trend, Cybersecurity Ventures’ prediction of 3.5 million unfilled positions worldwide by 2021 doesn’t sound unreasonable.

Tripwire is aware of these and other estimates. It wanted to hear what organizations are doing to address the skills gap. In response, Tripwire commissioned Dimensional Research to survey 336 IT security professionals about their employers’ experiences with the shortage.

Its findings were less than encouraging. Dimensional Research found that four-fifths of the respondents think it’s gotten harder to hire skilled security professionals over the past two years. (That proportion is up from 72 percent in 2017.) When asked to reflect on these difficulties, 93 percent of survey participants that the skills required to become a talented digital security (Read more...)