Have you seen any signs of positive change in the talent shortage?
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I think this hits the nail on the head, especially for legacy industries.<br><br>I think some of this pay gap can be explained by two things:<br><br>1. Anchoring, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias). People think the IT person of yesterday is the IT person of today and, in many cases, cannot fathom that there might be a paradigm shift in the skills required for the role (and compensation). It seems like a lot of digital transformation entails changing titles because ostensibly shaking the jar around is all you need to do to solve the problem; and<br>2. As someone who is relatively new to cyber (often a derivative of IT for better or worse) I often run into people who, in these same types of legacy companies, did not value IT, therefore had mediocre IT, which, in turn reinforces their belief that IT staff aren't anything special (so you don't need to pay them more). For example I constantly see people say their cyber team is weak, then find they took people who used to take calls from a helpdesk--and assumed people have largely focused on rote, algorithmic tasks, are capable of doing more complex, cognitive tasks, when in many cases, they were just adjacent to the thing you need to do.<br><br>Steve Jobs nailed it with his bozo explosion analogy, https://guykawasaki.com/how_to_prevent_/.
Yes. I was able to hire three new folks right before year-end.
Yes. With time and attention to sourcing, I’m seeing good results. There is a lot of talent in the market and a lot of companies aren’t working hard at it.
If you take a step back and look at it from a macro point of view, 30-40 years ago, the greatest minds in the world wanted to go into finance, or become doctors. Now that's shifted. Today, some of the brightest students want to go into technology, and are being recruited by the leading tech innovation companies in the world. So, while we do have a pain point that we are trying to solve for on a more micro level, the shift is happening at the macro level.
You are attracting talent into this industry. And finance is actually worried about losing top quality talent because they're no longer able to recruit those people, so they're trying to build their own internal training programs, which they never had to worry about before. So the shift is probably not happening as fast as we would like it to, and it's probably not happening in much smaller organizations. The Facebooks, Googles, and Microsofts of the world have a good appetite for attracting talent.
When you look at a startup with 20 people, they don't have the same capacity to attract talent the way that others do, and that's where the big difference is. But overall, I do think the shift is happening. People are seeing technology as the right field to build their careers in, especially when you think about how the trend's been going.
That shift is not happening fast enough, but it is happening.
The main change is that companies are upping the salaries to get the talent they need. The biggest problem in IT in general and in information security specifically, is that firms are not offering reasonable salaries for their open positions. Firms that pay market rates don’t struggle as much to find people.
https://engineering.tapad.com/the-fallacy-of-the-information-security-skill-shortage-c1214122e6c0