Studies are clear: Europe will be in need of nearly 350,000 cyber security specialists by 2022, and this need will reach 6 million specialists worldwide. The explosion of cybercrime trumps all cards whatsoever, especially when budgets allocated to cope with these new practices are constantly increasing—we are talking about $6 billion per year against $3 billion spent in 2015—and human resources are in a frantic race to recruit as much cybersecurity talent as possible. That’s not to mention the challenges organizations face in trying to train the experts of tomorrow.
(Photo by Hugo Jehanne on Unsplash)
Raising awareness, recruiting, and training the essential skills of tomorrow
As part of the International Cybersecurity Forum (FIC) that will take place from January 22nd to 23rd 2019 in Lille, training talent will play a major role. The event will concentrate on three challenges in order to organize and promote forensic professions—by that we mean the impact of science and know-how—that do the methodological and technological work of investigation, as well as creating defensive computer measures, to bring up new talent in order to have a greater number of experts. Forensic challenges, escape challenges, and strategy challenges are on the program. Forty students will undergo a hypothetical crisis scenario, such as the aftermath of a disaster event.
“The challenges of ethical hacking (techniques, social engineering, etc.) are essential tools to discovering and testing pirating actions, all with the goal to better protect organizations,” says Damien Bancal, organizer of the Challenge forensic CDAISI and journalist at Zataz, a site specialized information on computer security and cybersecurity.
The jobs of tomorrow
For Pascal Steichen, CEO of SECURITYMADEIN.LU and member of the European FIC committee, “training, be it initial or continuous, as well as the valorization of skills, are hot topics right now. Companies sorely lack specialized people in this domain. In Luxembourg, we do not feel it too much because the job market is doing well, but this is not the case for our neighbors.”
Today, every SME or structure of a certain size needs its Mister or Madam ‘security.’ You have to pay back testers, analysts, trainers, and so on. “We’re already seeing specific courses popping up. For example, there’s the Master in Management of information security at the University of Luxembourg.”
Among the most sought-after profiles, the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) function is in high demand right now. “It is similar to that of a Risk Manager, who, in addition to having managerial skills must also have technical, legal, and communication short. A real conductor, in short!”
