Cyber Labor Shortage Not What it Seems, Experts Say

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2014/August/Pages/CyberLaborShortageNotWhatitSeemsExpertsSay.aspx

By Stew Magnuson
National Defense
August 2014

Businesses and government agencies are engaged in a dogfight over cyber 
security talent, or so the conventional thinking goes. The shortage of 
qualified cyber security personnel continues to cause hand-wringing inside 
the beltway.

That is mostly still true, but the situation is more nuanced, said Alan 
Paller, co-founder of the CyberAces nonprofit, who also chaired a 
Department of Homeland Security task force on cyber job vacancies.

“There is no shortage of people who can talk and write about cyber 
security,” he said in an interview. “The shortage is in the people who 
actually have the hands-on skills to quickly find the infections, get rid 
of them and do good incident handling. Those skills are very rare.”

U.S. universities are cranking out plenty of graduates with cyber security 
related degrees, but they have mostly studied policy, he said. Many of 
those graduates aren’t getting good jobs. Faculty members don’t have 
real-world skills, so they are not teaching how to perform complicated 
tasks such as application penetration testing, advanced memory forensics 
or wireless hacker exploit development.

[...]

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