Cybersecurity: The hottest millennial career track
SMU's Fred Chang, the Lyle Endowed Centennial Distinguished Chair in Cyber Security, talks about the growing demand for people trained in cybersecurity.
By Serena Elavia
It seems as if every week a major corporation, government office or retailer suffers from a hacking, resulting in compromised personal information for millions of employees or customers. According to a recent survey from Raytheon (RTN), 79% of U.S. businesses suffered a cybersecurity incident within the last year.
Increasingly, as companies move more employee data online and consumers shop online, sensitive information is vulnerable to being hacked. As a result, the need for cybersecurity professionals is growing each year, while the availability of workers with those skills is not increasing. “These threats grow every day” says Valecia Maclin, Director of Cybersecurity and Special Missions at Raytheon. And the future of the profession relies on Millennials, as they’re the largest group in the American workforce. . .
Fred Chang, the Director of Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) Cybersecurity Institute, visits local middle schools near SMU in Dallas, TX, to teach youngsters about cybersecurity and spark their interest. Maclin insists that education has to start at the early education level. . .
Chang says that he has seen a growing interest over the last few years from students about cybersecurity studies, but that the U.S. needs to increase the number of available cybersecurity job candidates by at least 50% to meet the demand. “The internet was not designed to be secure. There will be no quick fix. We do need to be patient and make sure that five, 10, 20 years from now, things have changed” says Chang.
And while Wall Street at one point was the go to destination for recent graduates, which was then replaced with Silicon Valley, Maclin predicts that cybersecurity can become the next hot job path for recent graduates. “I have no doubt in my mind about that.”