Part II: Breaking into Cyber Security. Hard but Possible.

We left the last blog with answering the question of 'What is cyber security?'. Now let us discuss why should someone bother getting into this field.

WHY SHOULD I EVEN GET INTO THIS FIELD NOW:

The problem. A hack is performed every 14 seconds. The Annual Cybercrime Report estimates that cybercrime will cost USD $6 trillion by 2021, more than double the estimated USD $3 trillion in 2015. (source: https://medium.com/omers-ventures/cybersecurity-industry-overview-market-map-global-investments-636951b47e15#_ftn4)

The solution to this problem is to bring in capable people and technology to help stymie the rate in which businesses and people are hacked. The solution is having people come up with new ideas and processes to keep up with hackers and other types of threat actors.

The problem…uh again..We can't find the people with enough skills to help businesses and individuals stay protected. ISC(2) in its 2019 cyber workforce study noted that the Cyber security field is short roughly 4 million professionals globally. The US alone is short over 550K professionals, figure below. ISC(2) noted that to catch up, the workforce needs to grow by 145%. That's a huge hole to fill. (source: https://www.isc2.org/-/media/ISC2/Research/2019-Cybersecurity-Workforce-Study/ISC2-Cybersecurity-Workforce-Study-2019.ashx?la=en&hash=1827084508A24DD75C60655E243EAC59ECDD4482)

Figure 3. Cyber security workforce gap shows that 4 million cyber professionals are missing worldwide. We will stop here and move to part III of this discussion to answer the main question: Where and how does one get into this field?