Security Consultant - Job Role in 2021

Some common career paths from other industries in the sector include people who have previously worked in penetration testing (ethical hacking); or as a compliance analyst; security consultant; security operations or threat intelligence analyst.

Know more about security consultant job descriptions duties here!

These paths range in core competencies. From very technical roles that are a natural fit for someone with an engineering background to roles that are more process, data and analytics oriented.

When considering which path is right for you," she says, "I would advise creating an inventory of the skills you are most energized using in your current role.

While the cybersecurity labor shortage isn't going to disappear any time soon, experts agree that broadening the candidate pool will be crucial in addressing the shortage.

What that means now is pulling people out of adjacent disciplines and retraining them, or helping colleges improve their training so there's a better pipeline.

Businesses need to be more proactive in expanding their talent pool.

Companies need to be engaged in their communities, with their local schools and networking groups and support them and help drive that audience, and help create the talent pool.

Part of that is offering internships or real-world experience for students. It's going to help students ramp up much more quickly.

Several years ago IBM realized that it could no longer keep looking for staff in the same old places.

We couldn't keep trying to hire folks with bachelor's and master's degrees from top-tier universities. We recognized we had to start looking at the non-traditional talent pool.

We've been hiring people with college certificates, associate degrees, boot camp graduates, free online training, self-learning. And people who come in through apprenticeship programs.

There are so many unfilled cybersecurity jobs around the world, we couldn't possibly fill them all with university graduates. There just isn't enough people graduating with the right skills to fill all the open positions.

Diversity will also play an important role in expanding the pool further and bridging the skills gap.

Diversity is massively important. We're not solving a single problem that has a single answer.

We work in a dynamically evolving environment where attackers are trying to find diverse ways of disrupting our clients. So we must have a diversity of thought and a diversity of approach to think of new ways of combatting that.