“The size of the workforce gap is so big that it’s almost hard to imagine,” said Dr. Richard DeMillo, interim chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and professor of computing. “There are more open positions in cybersecurity around the world than there are cybersecurity professionals. We have to figure out ways of rapidly getting more trained people in the workforce.”
According to a report from (ISC)2, a nonprofit membership association in cybersecurity, the U.S. added more than 250,000 people to the cyber workforce between 2020 and 2021. Yet in 2021, the need for cybersecurity professionals increased by 30%. Also, (ISC)2 found that there are about 400,000 open cybersecurity roles in the U.S. and about 2.7 million unfilled cyber jobs globally.
DeMillo noted this shortage has been building for roughly a decade. As information technology has progressed over the past generation, bad actors—be they nation states or organized crime syndicates or retail criminals—have also found more tools to conduct cyberattacks. Much of the world’s economy and society has simultaneously moved onto computers and social media networks.
“So, all of that is now exposed,” said DeMillo. “When you boil it down, we’ve built infrastructure around the world that is not quite up to the task of protecting our underlying systems from being taken advantage of. In real terms, the cybersecurity skills needed simply aren’t there—and that’s where higher education comes in.”
In early 2020, a series of high-profile cyberattacks, namely the SolarWinds hack, led to greater visibility of this problem. Responding to that growing need, Georgia Tech in fall 2020 opened SCP with undergraduate and graduate programs focused on cybersecurity areas. SCP built on about 30 years of groundwork from Georgia Tech’s institute on cybersecurity and privacy.
But DeMillo noted some higher education institutions seeking to start or expand their programs may have to team up with others.
