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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."
I'm not a millennial, but I am familiar with computer system security, and while I don't have a security clearance, I do have a clean record which makes it possible to get one. Perhaps raytheon et al are simply expecting too much for too little pay. They're not going to find BS degree'd, clean cut 20 somethings with no criminal record if they insist on offering $12/hr wages. That mythical 22 year old working 22 hours a day for 22k a year doesn't exist.
The employees are out there but they cannot work for chinese slave labor wages, nor do they want that lifestyle.
I certainly wouldn't take a job that would force me to flee to another country for asylum if my conscience makes me become a whistle blower.
I would've thought 24% of young people being interested is pretty good. Especially for a niche job like this.
such a retarded word
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Please give me a big list of other occupations which more than 24% of a random sample of kids are interested in, then I'll allow you to claim that too few youngsters are interested in cybersecurity.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
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.
Progress is slowly being made in the use of capability based security.
If you think a technology will solve all our security problems, then you don't understand what security is all about.
Securty is a process, not a technology.
Every time you think you've built something idiot-proof; nature comes right in, and delivers you a more idiotic idiot.
Until you can eliminate all humans in organizations; computer security can never be a solved problem.
Because most security problems are caused by humans, AND IT security falls within the broader umbrella of risk management.
You will never own a perfectly secure system. Not now. Not in a thousand years.
It doesn't matter what fancy new capability-based models you come up with; there will always be threats and vulnerabilities.
A very surprisingly large number of corporations do NOT spend money on security.
Which is why the FBI surprised over 70 companies a couple years back when the FBI told them their systems had been hacked for the company's intellectual property. The companies in question had _no_ idea they'd been hit. Which is also why the NSA makes a point of touring US-based companies to present corporate execs (primarily in the IT end of things) un-classified reports on the latest security threats (if you don't already know, take a look at the NSA Information Assurance program). Which is why I was laid off because one such company was not going to listen to someone suggesting to them their computer security really sucked and were actually in the process of slashing intellectual property protection and computer security jobs. Again. For the eighth time in four years. So they could use the money "saved" on the salaries of people at my level who were also laid off to "buy" low level grunt "talent" in their China operations. That company's security still sux and remains far too easily hacked, and this is in a sixty year old high tech company that would've known better had they not be bought out by an aggressive "rollup" company to then be run by a bunch of greedy WallStreet-types who extract, literally, $100's of millions of dollars for themselves from the companies they've absorbed and stripped of assets.
So, no, many companies could give a rat's rear about security.
Only large corps really spend money on security...
Pretty even split between train drivers and astronauts.
That's the boys, obviously. I have no idea about the girls and they have cooties anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From the Raytheon article key figures: "Young men (35 percent) are far more interested than young women (14 percent) in a career in cybersecurity." If that many people are interested in cybersecurity, I'd call that "an overwhelming proportion" of persons being interested in cybersecurity. By that count, that's an enormous population of paranoid technofreaks.
"The survey also found less than one-quarter of young adults aged 18 to 26 believed the career is interesting at all." And how much of the total population gets employed in computer security AS A WHOLE? Less than 0.1% easily. How many other types of jobs, areas of interest and careers are there WITHOUT EVEN leaving the IT world?
The study page even highlights that they didn't target IT graduates. This is from a general, untargeted smattering of 1,000 members of the population. That's not even a proper sample size.
Bad journalism. Bad study report. Bad.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
When your job is security, the best thing that can happen is that you do an excellent job, and the end result is - nothing. That's the whole idea of it. If you do your job right, nothing happens. If you do your job badly, shit happens. Stuff gets stolen, and so on.
So will anyone congratulate you for a job well done? No, they will only see money spent on your salary with zero results. You will look as if the company could do without you. You know better, but the people who might give you a raise don't. And the people who could fire you to safe on salaries and increase profits don't.
You get much better recognition in a job that visibly produces positive results.