Part 2 of a series

By 2021, experts predict we’ll see 3.5 million open cybersecurity positions worldwide, with at least 500,000 of those unfilled jobs in the U.S. alone. That’s more than triple the shortfall that existed just two years ago. Meanwhile cyber-attacks are growing in scale and impact.

What’s an industry to do? Clearly, fixing the cybersecurity pipeline is an imperative, and it won’t be a simple fix.

Today’s talent shortage is similar to the run-up to 2000 with the dot-com bubble, says Eric Foster, COO of CYDERES, the Security-as-a-Service division of Fishtech Group. Then, most colleges couldn’t keep up with workforce demand for programmers, and many IT degrees didn’t have the right technologies or skills.

Today, while schools such as Carnegie Mellon and Stanford offer exceptional cybersecurity programs, programs more broadly are missing the mark, he said.

“IT, and especially cybersecurity, tend to move fast, and you can’t set a curriculum on specific technologies and have that be good for four, five, let alone 10 years,” he said. “We are finding a lot of times what [graduates] are learning in those cybersecurity programs may or may not be relevant to the current, real world cybersecurity.”

To bridge the gap and cultivate the next generation of IT talent, Fishtech and others are exploring an old school idea: formalized apprenticeships.

Read the complete article here.