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The Cybersecurity Industry Is Hiring, But Young People Aren't Interested
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Cybersecurity, as an industry, is booming. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs as network systems and information security professionals are expected to grow by 53 percent through 2018. Yet, young people today aren't interested in getting jobs in cybersecurity. By all accounts it's a growing and potentially secure, lucrative job. But according to a new survey by the defense tech company Raytheon, only 24 percent of millennials have any interest in cybersecurity as a career."
It isn't just security either; I see lots of jobs advertised at the moment here in London. It is overwhelmingly what they call "DevOps" and Java development. I have been following the market for a long while, and I can see the same roles coming up again and again, so clearly the companies are having trouble finding people.
Having worked in IT for far too many years, I know how it goes: when you hire new employees, you know they aren't going to be up to speed for at least 3 - 6 months. However, these companies are mostly new start-ups, so they think it is like hiring a contractor, and they want their new staff to be up to speed immediately. It's just not going to happen, but until they see sense and learn to plan for the long term, the situation will be that way; lots of jobs that go unfilled, and lots of well qualified people the can't find jobs. And it's not about money, really; these web companies could afford to think ahead and invest in people with good potential - and one could argue that they can't really afford NOT to do so.
On top of that, they don't actually know what they are looking for. Take this new buzzword, "DevOps"; it comes from "development" and "operations", and it means somebody who sits in the middle, between a development department and system administration; ideally this is a person who can do everything a developer does and everything a system administrator does, and such person is probably a developer who has grown into system administration. In the old mainframe days you would call them System Programmers, and they would be your most sacred asset. But what the web companies really mean when they say "DevOps" is just a low ranking build engineer, who knows how to use Puppet, Chef or Jenkins and is doing the same, repetitive task over and over, provisioning into the cloud. And they all want somebody who has "at least 5 years experience with the cloud"; has "The Cloud" even existed that long?
only 24 percent of millennials have any interest in cybersecurity as a career
That is not a lack of interest - it is an enormous interest. Think of when you were in class - if a quarter of the whole class were interested in one career. It is so high that I have difficulty believing it. If you assume that in any class you are going to have a 5% with no academic interest, maybe another 5% who truly want to pursue something non-technical, be it lawyer, politician, professional musician, sportsman, minister of religion, or artist - then I would say that it would be all the non-security related scientific, technical, and computer related industries that should be worried. If that figure were true it would mean that *most* people who are going to want a technical career would be looking at jobs in computer security.
I have to agree. I would have worked for Raytheon if they were interested in me as I have all the required study and would work initially for cheap, but they have basically said f*** o** to me in the past with no response. How am I supposed to now be interested in working for a company that only seems to want people with existing experience as well as skills? Sounds like they want to avoid training anybody and have poor HR people, do little advertising at universities, and cry like babies when they "can't find anybody."
former raytheon employee here; nobody who know anything about cybersecurity wants to work for them. The RayCERT is a joke. Raytheon has one very young and extremely unqualified person in charge of cybersecurity. How did he get his job? He was born to a Raytheon family. Nepotism rules that organization more than any Japanese Keiretsu or Korean Chaebol. Then you have people who treat computers as "those new fangled dohickies" in charge of IT security. My supervisor considered anybody born after 1959 a millenial. That doesn't even begin to address the turf war between the IT security and industrial security types that leaves a lot of stepping on each other toes in some areas and huge holes in coverage in others. In short, nobody who know anything about Raytheon and cybersecurity wants to work for Raytheon cybersecurity.
Yup, There is no labor shortage, They Just want to hire very cheap foriegn workers. Notice who is publishing the report, a company that wants to hire cheap labor.
Former Raytheon employee here as well, and I'll second everything the AC said. We often had team leads that were very young and inexperienced, whose only qualifications were that their mother and/or father worked for Raytheon. I did not work in a closed area, but knew many who did, and family connections were considered very helpful for getting the security clearances needed.