By George Barnes, Co-founder and Director of Hamilton Barnes, the leading provider of talent solutions to the network engineering sector.
Long, short, deep, shallow; depending who you listen to, decreasing GDP has resulted in a recession, but economists aren’t reliably able to predict how it will affect us and for how long. What I can safely predict, though, is that the technology sector will dodge the slump.
You see, contractions in GDP aren’t stopping businesses hiring tech specialists at unprecedented speeds and levels. Hamilton Barnes recruits for some of the leading providers to the network engineering space and it’s top talent that is needed to help organisations scale.
And this recession is different. During a recession, businesses often let go of employees and cut back spending in certain areas. Marketing is usually the first to go, followed by a decrease in tech and infrastructure investments, as businesses question what key areas they can afford to keep running. But a report by Morgan Stanley showed that security software is the area in which CIOs are least likely to cut spending, should the economy worsen. In fact, the need to invest in cybersecurity talent is undoubtably the most significant learning from 2022.
Why? Soaring levels of cybercrime during COVID-19.
Trend 1: Cybersecurity is here to stay.
As people worked from home during the pandemic, using personal devices and accessing sensitive data via unsecure Wi-Fi networks, business defences were weakened and cybercriminals were able to mount all-out assault on unprotected working environments. Cybercrime is therefore at an all-time high and the average cost of an attack has soared into the tens of thousands of pounds. Attacks on businesses increased by almost 70% in 2021, with two in five of those targeted at SMEs, because security was not sufficiently agile enough to prevent or mitigate against threats. Malware, phishing, ransomware, denial of service attacks, and SQL injections are all on the up, and businesses are having to make investments in stronger cyber protection, rather than cutting back.
Fortunately, the question now appears to be, ‘how can you afford NOT to invest in cybersecurity?’ and this is a step in the right direction, away from cybersecurity being an afterthought for many businesses. Indeed, prior to the pandemic, SMEs would struggle to get cybersecurity funding until they were the victim of an attack. Only then would it become a priority.
But clearly this approach of waiting until the horse has bolted isn’t serving us because we’re now playing catch-up. Despite a surge in recruitment to try and fill the talent gap, there is a global skills shortage of 3.5 million cyber professionals in the current market. This has caused a high demand for those with the right skills and salaries are now soaring to draw in the most experienced talent. Hamilton Barnes is seeing cyber positions that used to pay £80k per annum being advertised at over £110k and organisations that don’t have that kind of capital are being forced to look at younger candidates. Graduates are being offered salaries of £50k+ when their only cyber experience is studying it in a textbook. But until there is greater external investment in the sector, what choice do businesses have? After all, no experience is better than no staff.
Trend 2: 2023: the year of greater Cybersecurity diversity.
I – along with other Hamilton Barnes colleagues – regularly visit schools and universities, career fairs and other events, to raise awareness of the career opportunities that are available to young people across the networking sector. Five years ago, in a lecture theatre filled with 100 STEM students, there’d be maybe one girl. Now it’s more like 20.
Progress is still needed, through improving exposure to the industry for girls during early education and through university programmes, and there’s work to be done to remove stereotyping, which remains rife across the industry – many of the female guests on the Hamilton Barnes ‘The Route to Networking’ podcast admitted to having faced this, for example being on the receiving end of misogynistic comments.
But cyber is slowly waking up to gender diversity being crucial to the success of the sector. Diversity promotes diversity of thought and the fact is that women are bloody good in cybersecurity roles – it’s in their evolution. I recently read Yuval Noah Hariri’s fascinating study of humankind’s evolution, Sapiens, which explores how our early male ancestors honed their long-distance vision for hunting with spears, whereas females’ sight was more geared towards foraging. This has resulted in women developing a greater attention to detail and a more analytical brain, making them perfectly geared towards cybersecurity roles.
So we need more inspirational women to come to the fore and less of a macho image that it’s only men than can be responsible for helping businesses make pioneering leaps forward in the current climate.
Trend 3: 2023: the year of greater Cybersecurity neurodiversity.
Recruiting people with neurodiversity to the sector is another way of not only filling vacancies, but filling them with people capable of coming up with newer ideas from many different perspectives. Cyber is ever evolving and it makes sense to hire people who are capable of approaching cyber professionalisms in a different way.
Much like their female counterparts, neurodivergent employees, such as people with autism or ADHD often demonstrate a keen attention to detail and ability to remain hyper focused. This is useful in many areas of cybersecurity, including defending against and responding to attacks where team members require the ability to identify anomalies, to discover root causes of incidents, to problem solve and sit through complex tasks for long periods of time. These skills and traits are of course useful in many other areas of cyber security too.
Again, there’s work to be done but organisations ensuring employment policies are inclusive, introducing training on unconscious bias and actively targeting neurodivergent people and understanding the barriers that the face, are going to lead the charge in building a better, faster and more secure internet for everybody.
