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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing today? Um Thanks for joining the show again and thanks for joining every day. It's been really great to grow this up to a pretty decent size audience and continuing to grow. And as part of that growth, I'm getting more and more questions and I would say probably 80% of the questions, 85% of the questions focus on how to get started in cybersecurity.
So people reaching out, looking for advice, wanting to make a career change, wanting to start their careers, trying to get off on a positive note, trying to get into the field of cybersecurity. And I think that's absolutely fantastic. We know we have a massive massive skills gap that we need to close.
Um And more people excited more people interested. Um That's a very good thing. This video today, the stream today. Um The podcast today is not about those people. It's about one of the questions that I'm seeing more and more. That's troubling is that people have started to take a few steps down the road to cybersecurity.
They've gone out and they've either gotten a certification or they've started studying or they're taking a course, they're doing something to increase their skills. That's excellent. That is absolutely wonderful where people are running into a problem is finding appropriate positions, finding junior positions, finding entry level positions that will help bring them along.
And I think there's a number of challenges here. One of which is the fact that we need to update our expectations. We need to update our requisitions for new jobs within our company. So this is directed more hiring managers more towards hr I don't have a solution for this one, but I will call out the fact that you can't ask for a junior cyber security professional with two years experience and expect to get a ton of people applying junior, you know, is really difficult to move along.
Entry level is even harder. You can't ask for any experience of energy level other than, you know, some proof point that they've taken some steps and understand some of the challenges. Um There's a disconnect and that's really what I wanted to highlight in this video is that there is a significant disconnect between us saying we need to fill the skills gap and then companies not investing in people just fill that skills gap.
Now, the reason being I think again, speculation top of head, that's what this show is all about. Just sort of rambling on about a particular topic. I think the biggest challenge is that we are used to in it being able to say like, hey, I'm going to do a web solution.
And so I'm going to go look for folks with this skill set. And there's a pool of people who have that skill set or something that immediately translates over. We've gotten kind of spoiled that way. And I think when it comes to cybersecurity, we need to expand that definition.
We need to figure out a different way of approaching it because what we're looking for doesn't exist. There's no pool of those candidates. Anyone with a significant cybersecurity background is already working. We have negative unemployment in this space. It's a wonderful space to be in for cybersecurity pros but to get more people to fill that skills gap, we need to take alternative approaches.
Companies need to invest in training people without any cybersecurity investment and whether that's for themselves or to push back out into the world, whether that's, you know, for doing it centrally for a global organization, pushing them out to the regions, whether that's working in partnership with other companies and helping build out networks of these folks.
There's no easy answer. This is going to take a long time to address. But I know we need to think outside the box if all we're doing is saying, hey, we need people with a year's experience even that can be prohibitive because those people aren't there people with a year's experience.
We may see job hopping, but we're not filling that new so we may be able to entice somebody from another company to come work for us in a junior or a mid level position, but we still have that skills gap as a community overall. And I know you might be thinking, I'm just running my team.
I don't worry about the community overall at some point, you will because if you're poaching people from other and you know, poaching is a bad word. Let me say that if you're offering jobs that are being filled by candidates from other organizations, at some point, you're going to be in the exact same boat because you've offered a junior person, a mid level, someone else is going to come and offer a senior level to your mid level and pull them away because that's a great opportunity cybersecurity pros have.
So we need to address this big time as a community and we need to think outside the box. I don't have every solution, but I know what we're doing right now is not working. We cannot simply fill the gap fast enough by not hiring. We don't have enough incoming people into the community to fill that gap.
That's part of the problem. I think you guys all know, I have a huge challenge with how we run cyber security in general. But what I wanted to talk about was specifically this problem today because I've seen a bunch of questions from people who have honestly made a great effort they've started their cybersecurity education and they are having a hard time finding a position that will help them take it further.
That's a shame to me because here they are, they've done work on the time on their off hours on the weekend side of the desk, increased their education level and they're unable to find a placement. I'm not sure what the solution is. I know what we're doing right now isn't working.
What do you think? Hit me up online, marknca in the comments down below here on the, on the vlog or as always by email me@markn.ca, what have you seen work? What have you seen that doesn't work? Are you struggling with this problem?
Um Did you find a way to help people through this problem? Let me know. Um I hope you are set up for a fantastic day and a great weekend as a heads up next week, I'm traveling west coast of North America. Um So show timing might be a little bit off depending on how well I adjust to the time zone, but I will be trying to broadcast.
I'm out there for cus comp and then mid week or end of the week, I'm in Chicago for the Aws summit there. So stay tuned. Have a great day. Have a fantastic weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
