Sizing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap: A white paper

Whether you're in charge of the security of your organization’s data and systems, or working in IT security, or looking for a career, it is hard to ignore headlines like this: “One Million Cybersecurity Job Openings in 2016.” The term “cybersecurity skills gap” is now being used as shorthand for the following assertion: there are not enough people with the skills required to meet the cybersecurity needs of organizations. (You will also see cyber skills gap as a short form of cybersecurity skills gap, but some people also use cyber skills gap for the broader lack of people with skills like coding, networking, etc. so I often use cybersecurity skills to avoid ambiguity)

But is this gap real? Is the million missing people claim true? The security industry has a shaky record when it comes to numbers, something I talked about at Virus Bulletin last year in the context of cybercrime (see paper and video of session here). At this year's Virus Bulletin in Denver I will be presenting a paper about efforts to address the cybersecurity skills gap. I am also studying aspects of the problem for my MSc dissertation (see CISO Survey).

In the midst of all this work I accumulated some observations about the size of the cyber skills gap and wrote them up in my spare time, in the form of a paper titled Sizing the Cyber Skills Gap. I hope folks find this useful.
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The Effective CISO Survey: A call for participation

SURVEY NOW CLOSED. PLEASE CHECK BACK IN OCTOBER

FOR A REPORT ON THE RESULTS

Are you a CISO? Do you work for or with a CISO?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, please consider taking the 12 minute survey I am conducting for my MSc in Security and Risk Management at the University of Leicester in England. Your participation would be greatly appreciated and you can get an early copy of the resulting report. To get right to it, the survey starts here: http://cisosurvey.org.

Why am I doing this? To find answers to this question: What do you need to be an effective Chief Information Security Officer? This is the subject of my dissertation, a piece of original research about 15,000 words in length, conducted in Leicester's Criminology Department, pictured below (it may look like Hogwarts, but it ranks among the world's top universities).

University of Leicester, Department of Criminology
(I kid you not, I took this myself on my first visit)

The question about what it takes be an effective CISO is not merely academic, it is also of immediate practical importance. Right now, under-staffed crews of information security folks are struggling to hold the line against criminal activity in cyberspace. And there are not enough people in the education and employment pipeline to fill all of the open defensive positions. 

This situation is referred to as the "cyber skills gap" and later this month I will be releasing a white paper in which I examine the claim that there are one million unfilled cybersecurity positions globally (there will be a link on this page). In the US alone the gap could be as big as 200,000. This situation, which has been building for some time, has caused many countries to begin pouring money into cybersecurity education and workforce training. However, some of these funds may be wasted because there has been very little research into what a cybersecurity career is like. What does success look like? What is job satisfaction like? What personality traits are a good fit for cyber roles, and so on. On the bright side, by studying these questions we may find ways to close the skills gap and make cyberspace a safer place (hmm, I wonder if optimism is an important trait).

I decided to devote my dissertation to one small part of this cyber research gap: what it takes to do the top job, to be the person who manages information security for the organization: the CISO. My research led me to create the Effective CISO survey, which is carried out through SurveyMonkey but accessed via a website I created at cisosurvey.org, all of which has passed the university's ethics review process.

If you want further verification, or have any questions about this project at all, please email my university email account which is stcnn at student.le.ac.uk, where nn = is a two digit number, the one you get when you multiply four by itself. The address is also displayed beneath the university logo at the top of the page.

So, if this survey subject is of interest to you, and you would like to get an early look at my results, and you have about 12 minutes, please consider participating at cisosurvey.org.

THANK YOU!