Approximately 350 000 current cybersecurity openings in US and a big demand for IIoT specialists

Approximately 350 000 current cybersecurity openings in US and a big demand for IIoT specialists

Cybercrime will more than triple the number of job openings over the next 5 years, according to the Cybersecurity Jobs Report, realized by Cybersecurity Ventures. The cybersecurity job forecasts have been unable to keep pace with the dramatic rise in cybercrime, which is predicted to cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015.

The 2014 Cisco Annual Security Report ventured what became a widely popular cybersecurity jobs forecast over the past 3 years, originally stating “It’s estimated that by 2014, the industry will still be short more than a million security professionals across the globe.”

In 2015, Symantec expected the demand for cybersecurity talent would rise to 6 million globally by 2019, with a projected shortfall of 1.5 million.

A 2016 skills gap analysis from ISACA estimated a global shortage of 2 million cybersecurity professionals by 2019 (a half-million more than Symantec’s prior estimate), according to the UK House of Lords Digital Skills Committee.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) recently estimated that India alone will need 1 million cybersecurity professionals by 2020 to meet the demands of its rapidly growing economy.

In 2017 the U.S. employs nearly 780,000 people in cybersecurity positions, with approximately 350 000 current cybersecurity openings, according to CyberSeek, a project supported by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The current number of U.S. cybersecurity job openings is up from 209,000 in 2015. At that time, job postings were already up 74 percent over the previous five years, according to a Peninsula Press analysis of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Security starts at the top. Right now, about 65% of large U.S. companies have a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) position, up from 50% in 2016, according to ISACA, an independent, nonprofit, global association. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that 100% of large companies globally will have a CISO position by 2021.

Read the full article by Steve Morgan, the founder and Editor-In-Chief at Cybersecurity Ventures.

As in April, BPI Network published a report focused on IIoT, I would like to add a few more facts about IIoT jobs. The study highlights perspectives from 350 global IoT leaders, as well as detailed insights from 15 leading executives across industries most greatly impacted by the Industrial IoT revolution, including aerospace, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation and automotive, and construction.

According to the study, 31 percent of respondents believe there is a major skills gap that exists about employees’ ability to meet the new and demanding goals of properly executing on operational connectedness and IIoT data utilization strategies. With that being said, 51 percent of executives believe they are at least improving the skills needed for IIoT success. However, it is unclear to what degree these skills are being acquired by existing employees versus the degree to which they are being brought into the enterprise through new hires.
The executive summary of the report or the full version of the study can be accessed on BPI Network website.