3.5 million. That’s how many unfilled jobs there are in the cybersecurity profession worldwide, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Nick Merrill directs the Daylight Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and he asks the critically important question: How will we fill them?
Here’s the problem, according to Merrill: There just aren’t enough young people. According to research from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, only 1.8 million people will enter the workforce in the next seven years. Of the 3.5 million unfilled jobs, around 500,000 to 750,000 of them, according to fluctuating figures from CyberSeek over the past two years, will be in the U.S. To fill them, we’d need to train as much as 40 percent of all new workforce entrants in cybersecurity.
The situation is even more dire in other parts of the world. While the U.S. population continues to grow (for now), many others are shrinking. Japan’s population has been declining since 2010, and Taiwan’s will start to decline soon. In the European Union, deaths have outnumbered births since 2012. Merrill believes that the U.S. needs skilled immigration pathways for Cybersecurity professionals.
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