The cybersecurity field is facing a persistent workforce shortage, and educating young people about the importance of cybersecurity and its career opportunities is one way that Bridget Bean, the executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is aiming to help solve it.
Speaking at the Act-IAC 2024 Cybersecurity Summit on Oct. 9, Bean said that helping young people understand the impact that cyber has on their everyday lives and building on opportunities in schools at all levels can attract, recruit, and place the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
“The first thing I think we need to do is really start at a very young age,” said Bean, who recently returned from Phoenix where she met with elementary, middle school, and college students to discuss cyber career opportunities.
Part of the conversation, she said, includes encouraging youth to explore how their career interests intersect with the cyber field, such as understanding cybersecurity’s importance to business success and ensuring that stakeholders understand cyber risks.
Doing so can help youth “understand that this is just part of their DNA moving forward.”
“It is a challenge, if you want to look at the numbers, they’re staggering – our vacancies. But I have incredible confidence in the people who are going to be joining the workforce, who are in the workforce,” said Bean.
The White House has been pushing to help fill the 500,000 cyber job vacancies across the country with recent steps including the National Cybersecurity Workforce and Education Strategy launched in July 2023, and by changing educational credential hiring requirements to skill-based hiring.
Bean also emphasized the importance of the revolving door between industry and the Federal government and said that barriers to moving between sectors need to be lowered.
She likened that movement to a “recycling arrow, where we get these people who get experience, and then they take another opportunity, they have more experience, and they bring that, those relationships and that understanding of how the other side works, back into the Federal government, where we really need that expertise,” said Bean.
