Industry Wide Personnel Shortages

We keep hearing about the massive shortage and how millions of vacant positions will exist.

Some thoughts..

First, while academia focused curriculum seems good on paper - an alignment is still missing. The "industry", or company gaps, needs investigated. Someone fresh out of school may be a good analyst, administrator, or even manager, and may even master one domain of a Security Monitoring (SOC) analyst, which is a combination of many skills.

The real solution to this systemic issue is to holistically fix it - however the government is akin to a large corporation and moves at a slow pace, therefore by the time frameworks are created and mandated technology will shift enough to miss the mark.

The feasible option seems to be an apprenticeship - most internships are laughable and mostly consist of the grunt work - so what if the student curriculum was on par, companies understood a generalist is not the way (a team of specialists in specific domains are is the way) then an apprenticeship would further enable the student to achieve the "Master degree" level that companies truly expect personnel to perform at.

I consider this a back to basics approach - we often see a fallacy with the "got to have it" when it comes to technology - usually followed by a cycle of downsizing. A good Director or Officer should also look at current resources for a solution before deeming the problem so complicated a new solution or invention is warranted.

Now on the hiring side: you need to identify if you are hiring 1 person or a group and if it is a group, how many and what should each specialize in

Take their papers (diploma's, certifications) with a grain of salt - I've seen Offsec certified people who were just terrible hackers. Aptitude is a thing..you cannot take an MBA and assume you can make him a security analyst doing incident response.

So in summary - if big academia wants to rival the "trade schools" for computer coding, which do an amazing job at taking non IT and making them senior programmers - then apprenticeship is a great way to do just that.