Cybersecurity Hiring Plentiful

By Edward Gately

While not at the volume of other tech sectors, cybersecurity has been shedding workers amid ongoing economic uncertainty. Sophos recently slashed 10% of its global workforce, and just this week OpenText declared 8% cuts. These followed layoffs at Cybereason, Aqua Security and more.

However, demand for cybersecurity professionals remains high, according to the latest data from CyberSeek in partnership with the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education at NIST, CompTIA and Lightcast. The total number of employed cybersecurity workers held fairly steady in 2022 at around 1.1 million, while the number of online job postings edged down to 755,743, from 769,736 in the 12-month period ending in December 2021.

Will Markow is Lightcast’s vice president of allied research-talent.

“Despite concerns about a slowing economy, demand for cybersecurity workers remains historically high,” he said. “Companies know cyber crime won’t pause for a market downturn. So employers can’t afford to pause their cybersecurity hiring.”

Eric Parizo is managing principal analyst at Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa). He said cybersecurity employment is a “mixed bag.”

“To varying degrees, every organization is retrenching due to economic uncertainty, and cybersecurity is not immune from that,” he said. “The worst-case scenario for each company will differ widely; hence, the proactive measures we’re seeing to trim costs by cutting staff are also varied. Because it’s unclear when economic conditions will improve, this ‘wait and see’ period will likely continue, with more vendors and companies conducting cybersecurity-related staff reductions for some time to come.”