U.S. Faces 33% Skills Shortage for Crucial Security Roles

With cybersecurity attacks continuing to make headlines throughout the world, U.S. employers continue to see a wide gap between the demand for cybersecurity professionals and supply of job seekers. “2016 saw a spate of big corporations—and even the U.S. electoral process—suffer high-profile data breaches,” said Economist Daniel Culbertson of Indeed. “But beyond the headlines, cybercrime is a threat to organizations of all sizes and in all industries. As cyberattacks continue to grow in scale and sophistication, U.S. employers are still struggling to recruit employees with the skills and experience needed to protect them from attacks.”

Although the overall global mismatch between employer demand and talent supply continues today, the United States, Ireland, Italy, France, Israel, Germany, and Australia saw slight improvements in their cybersecurity talent shortage from two years ago, according to the Indeed Spotlight: The Global Cybersecurity Skills Gap.

The United States actually saw the second largest gain in closing the gap as job seeker interest in cybersecurity roles rose from meeting 60 percent of employer demand in 2014 to 67 percent in 2016. However, in some countries, the mismatch grew more severe. In Canada, in 2014, job seeker interest met 80 percent of the demand, and now it only meets 68 percent of demand. In the United Kingdom, it dropped from 37 percent to 32 percent. In Brazil there was an 11 percent drop from 44 percent to 33 percent.

Indeed also analyzed the talent shortages linked to certain cybersecurity specializations, identified the growth fields, and found wide variation in skills demand by country. There remains strong global demand for network security specialists, and they possess the most highly desired skill set in Israel, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany alike.

In the United States, security pros with Internet of Things (IoT) expertise grew more than 220 percent over two years, while cloud security jobs grew 45 percent and mobile grew 9 percent.