Overcoming the Cybersecurity Skills Gap: 4 Strategies to Find In-Demand IT Talent

87% of IT leaders experienced one or more security breaches last year, according to Fortinet. What’s more, the average cost of a breach in 2024 sits at $4.88 million and takes an average of 2.7 years to recover from. So unless you’ve got money to burn, ramping up cybersecurity efforts is mission-critical.

But where do you start? According to that same Fortinet study, a majority of IT leaders say that security breaches are primarily caused by a lack of necessary skills and training among their IT staff.

If you don’t want your brand featured in headlines as the latest victim of a data breach, it’s time to close the cybersecurity skills gaps among your team.

Why Are There So Many Cybersecurity Skills Gaps Today?

90% of organizations have skills gaps among their cybersecurity teams. This is both a problem and an opportunity. A problem because, chances are, your organization falls within that 90%. An opportunity, because if you can close those gaps, you’ll pull ahead of the vast majority of your competition.

But first: why are cybersecurity skills gaps so prevalent? Here are a few key factors at play:

• Rapid tech advancements mean that traditional education isn’t able to keep up with skills requirements
• A high learning curve to achieve proficiency in cybersecurity, which often requires years of training and experience
• Increasing complexity in the cybersecurity landscape as threats become more sophisticated and harder to identify and stop
• Job stress often causes cybersecurity professionals to leave the career path, resulting in institutional brain drain

All of these factors contribute to a deficit of over 4 million qualified cybersecurity professionals necessary to meet current demands. Unless the industry can reverse course on this deficit, security breaches will continue, and businesses will increase their incurred risk and costs.

Which Cybersecurity Skills Have the Biggest Gaps?

Before we dive into strategies to help build up cybersecurity skills among your organization, we first need to pinpoint which skills are the most important. According to data from ISC2, here are some areas where cybersecurity skills gaps are most prominent.

Cloud computing skills

Whether we’re talking cloud architecture and design principles, cost management, or automation and DevOps, cloud skills have never been in higher demand. 94% of companies are adopting some form of cloud computing, and the demand pressure is outpacing talent’s ability to keep up.

Zero Trust implementation

Zero Trust is an approach to network security that assumes nothing is trusted by default. Instead, the security system verifies all users and devices before granting them access to the network or application. As the average cost of an insider attack sits at $4.99 million per year, adopting this model can seriously cut down on wasted dollars.

However, Zero Trust is a relatively new approach to cybersecurity. What’s more, it requires a major overhaul of pretty much every one of your current practices. As such, the pool of talent that’s well-versed in this approach is small, and thus harder to find and place.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Go to any software or IT website and see how long it takes to find some reference to artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML). You probably won’t last longer than 30 seconds. That’s how ubiquitous AI is in our industry.

And although AI has been around at some level for decades, it’s certainly having a moment in the last few years. According to Gartner, by 2026 80% of companies will use some form of generative AI in their products and organizations. But the fact that 43% of companies call AI their “biggest skills gap” means that it’s going to take a while before the talent market catches up with high demand.

Governance, risk, & compliance (GRC)

The regulatory environment continues to evolve in complexity, especially as more companies start playing on a global stage. GDPR and CCPA are just the tip of the iceberg. If your tech company operates in healthcare, finance, or other highly regulated industries, you face a complex GRC landscape. Finding individuals with the knowledge to navigate it is an ever-growing challenge.

Soft skills

While the hard skills mentioned above contribute greatly to cybersecurity skills gaps, equally important are soft skills, namely communication and creative thinking. As more IT tasks are automated by AI solutions and available data becomes ubiquitous, the ability to creatively analyze data and ask critical questions remains something only human beings can do.

4 Strategies to Close Cybersecurity Skills Gaps

Now that we’ve identified the biggest cybersecurity skills gaps facing the industry, let’s take a look at four strategies to help you close them.

1. Adopt skills-based hiring

According to CompTIA’s State of Cybersecurity report, organizations are shifting away from hiring people based on college degrees. Instead, they’re turning to people with on-the-ground expertise or skills-based credentials.

Skills-based hiring can be a helpful way to target your hiring efforts at areas where you have the biggest gaps. Rather than cast the net wide and hope to catch a unicorn, you can target a wider pool of candidates who may not fit a profile 100% but still have the specific skills you need.

Skills-based hiring is particularly important in areas where traditional education is lagging behind rapid-pace market demands. To find people with these skills, it’s important to have someone in the recruiting process who knows what they’re looking for and how to evaluate candidate competence.

2. Upskill less experienced employees

In addition to targeting highly skilled candidates, another equally viable approach is to upskill your current employee base. Maybe you have some entry-level employees who are interested in cybersecurity but haven’t been trained. By investing in their training, you can build key cybersecurity skills in-house—essentially home-growing your own competitive advantage.

3. Offer competitive compensation packages

For the rest of the market, job demand is high, which means employers are in the driver’s seat and can set the terms of negotiations. Not so in the tech sector, and certainly not in cybersecurity.

Which means that you can’t afford to be choosy when it comes to the people you hire. Instead, you should craft compensation packages that are at least comparable to what your higher end competitors are offering. Otherwise, your target candidates won’t pay you any mind.

Alternatively, you could position yourself as a highly innovative company with exciting projects and an attractive culture. But that requires you to have someone in your corner to advocate on your behalf—it’s hard to do this through manual posting on job boards.

4. Work with a cybersecurity talent expert

An expert partner in cybersecurity talent acquisition can be a serious hack to closing skills gaps within your organization. The best partners have deep networks of talent that they nurture and curate over time. Filling critical roles can be only a phone call away—an advantage that many of your competitors may not have.

Final Thoughts on Closing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap

At Concero, we’ve seen an uptick in companies hiring for Security and Cloud roles. This aligns with the data we’ve reviewed in this article: more companies are moving to the cloud, and they want to ensure their infrastructure remains secure while they do so.

As a result of this increase in demand, we’ve been building up our network of cybersecurity talent. Our in-depth screening, interview, and talent nurture process enables our team to pinpoint which core competencies among our talent base and connect you with candidates that match your desired skills.

To learn more, reach out to Concero and our team can walk you through our talent acquisition process.