Over 300K Cybersecurity Jobs Remain Open in the US, Study Finds

Looking for work? There are over 300,000 cybersecurity jobs open within the US, which includes more than 13,000 positions within state and federal agencies, according to an industry study released earlier this month.

Overall, there were 768,096 cybersecurity workers employed in the US between April 2017 and March of this year, according to CyberSeek, a resource for security professionals developed by IT jobs and career firm CompTIA.

The study comes at a time when the Trump Administration has been calling for greater resources in cybersecurity to protect the nations' critical industries, while investing in technology, such as cloud computing, to help the federal government standardize its IT infrastructure. (See Unknown Document 743973.)

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The CyberSeek report found that for every 6.5 employed workers in the US, there was one opening. However, that number drops to 2.5 employed workers for every opening in the cybersecurity market, which equals out to 301,873 open jobs in the US in private business and the public sector.

This shortage of workers has not gone unnoticed.

At the Gartner Symposium and ITXpo in October, analysts warned of the need for more security professionals, and they urged their audience to invest more in artificial intelligence and machine learning to help close the gap since there were no enough qualified candidates to fill all these open positions. (See Unknown Document 743973.)

"For all the focus on new and emerging technologies, cybersecurity remains the constant, led by a trained and certified cybersecurity workforce," Todd Thibodeaux, the president and CEO of CompTIA, wrote in a June 6 statement. "CyberSeek demonstrates that the cybersecurity field is rich with opportunities for current and prospective technology professionals."

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Mike Banic, vice president of Vectra, a San Jose-based provider of automated threat management tools, noted that overwhelming amount of data that security professionals have to monitor each day -- numbers from Equifax show that the company Cyber Threat Center captures 2.5 billion logs each day and monitors about 50,000 cybersecurity events every second -- burns security employees out and these positions need to be supplemented, which is one reason why there are so many job openings.

"No matter how many cybersecurity professionals you hire, human beings aren't good are drudging through a mountain of manual work, yet our industry keeps asking them to," Banic wrote in an email to Security Now. "This is tantamount to building a million cars by hands."

Not surprisingly, the largest number of open cybersecurity jobs is in the Washington, DC metro area, with 43,200 positions listed, according to the CyberSeek report. That's followed by New York City with 19,993 and Chicago with 11,464.

The CyberSeek data also shows that largest number of security job openings -- over 194,000 -- are in the category of Operate and Maintain, which is mainly a support role that involves the administration and maintenance of various IT systems.

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— Scott Ferguson is the managing editor of Light Reading and the editor of Security Now. Follow him on Twitter @sferguson_LR.