Study: US Cybersecurity Workforce in Short Supply

The demand for cybersecurity workers across the United States continues to grow, according to new data from CyberSeek, a DC-based cybersecurity career and workforce resource.

Citing data from the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security, “employers increasingly are concerned about the relevance of cybersecurity-related education programs meeting the needs of their organizations.”

Nationally, there were 301,873 cybersecurity job openings in the private and public sectors during the 12-month period between April 2017 and March 2018. The total employed U.S. cybersecurity workforce during the same period was 768,096.

CyberSeek is a joint development of CompTIA, a technology industry association, and Burning Glass Technologies, a labor market analytics firm.

“The cybersecurity talent shortage is widespread, impacting all 50 states,” said Matthew Sigelman, CEO at Burning Glass Technologies. “In every state, the employed cybersecurity workforce would have to grow by over 50 percent to align with the market average supply and demand ratio.”

Across all jobs, there were 6.5 employed workers per opening from during the surveyed period. In cybersecurity, there are only 2.5 employed workers per opening. The metro regions with the largest absolute number of cybersecurity job openings are Washington, D.C. (43,200 openings), New York (19,993) and Chicago (11,464).

“We’ve seen dramatic shifts in enterprise technology as organizations adopted a cloud-first mentality, mobile devices became ubiquitous and digital data has grown in relevance,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA. “Yet for all the focus on new and emerging technologies, cybersecurity remains the constant, led by a trained and certified cybersecurity workforce.”

CyberSeek was created through a grant awarded by NIST, a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce that promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology.

Channel Impact^®
The new study demonstrates a clear opportunity in this segment of the IT industry. It comes on the heels of a new government report that calls for immediate and sustained improvements in the country’s cybersecurity workforce.