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Corporate social responsibility is key to closing cybersecurity talent gap
The cybersecurity talent gap is undeniable. It’s also a presidential priorityand well-established trend that some estimates project will reach 3.5 million unfilled positions by 2021. And it’s not just a question of numbers but also skills. A January report by the Center for Strategic & International Studiesasked if cybersecurity education and training programs are teaching the right skills to fill needed jobs and found that “the evidence suggests that the answer may be no.”
The lack of diversity is an added wrinkle in the difficulties of staffing the cyber workforce. As government research and other studies show, women and minorities remain seriously underrepresented in cybersecurity. I saw firsthand signs of this during a recent university talk I gave on cloud security. Across a lecture hall filled with more than 70 students, the vast majority were white males.
Yet for all the clarity around this talent gap, what’s less clear is how to close it. Typical recruitment efforts can only go so far toward a solution, but that is generally where companies stop paying attention. The reality is that most of our workforce challenges can only be addressed through larger societal efforts; by extension, that means our strategies for solving them must go beyond just HR and to the heart of our larger corporate social responsibility (CSR) mission.
CSR initiatives can help close the talent gap to the extent that we, as the cybersecurity industry, realize that it’s our job to help bridge this gap through a variety of initiatives — many of which lie well beyond the corporate walls. This includes building training programs, fostering workforce diversity initiatives in the community and reaching deep into the educational pipeline, including the K-12 ranks, to cultivate the next generation of cybersecurity pros.
Every cybersecurity company (every cybersecurity practitioner, even) has a role to play in this greater CSR mission. It could be giving a local talk to a nearby school or university, sponsoring internships or scholarships, participating in a group like the Global Cyber Alliance (which my company is a member of), or supporting any number of efforts designed to chip away at the diversity gap.
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