The cybersecurity skills shortage is reaching crisis levels with job openings far outpacing available talent. Cybersecurity job openings grew by 350% over the past few years with some 3.5 million positions globally and three-quarters of a million positions in the U.S. going unfilled in 2023. This means companies are being forced to stretch security teams even further, often asking personnel to pick up the slack from a depleted workforce, or engaging with a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP)/Managed Detection & Response (MDR) to fill in the gaps. The latter addresses the macro-problem, but they too need access to a highly skilled workforce.
The Cybersecurity Workforce Study by non-profit IT Consortium (ISC)2 reports that amid increasing digital transformation and cloud migration, the cybersecurity skills gap is widening at unprecedented levels. Solving this skills gap will require an ongoing commitment to in-house training targeted to a company’s unique environment and standards. Upskilling the existing workforce with directly applicable knowledge and skills is the most effective approach. Generalized or irrelevant training only exacerbates the shortage by wasting limited resources.
MSSPs and MDRs Face Increasing Cyber Threats
These shortages of staff and skills are impacting nearly every organization, including MDRs and MSSPs that use economies of scale to provide high-quality services to their clients. Not only can this impact the quality of service delivery to clients, but it can make it challenging for clients to implement the needed improvements in their own security posture. At the same time, new threats are emerging every day. Cybercriminals have become increasingly sophisticated in their attacks and target MSSPs in large numbers.
The need for continuous learning and adaptation for MSSPs and MDRs at the client level is crucial. Security teams need to be at the top of their game and consistently scale their skillset.
Cybersecurity Skills Development Plan
You can’t wait for the perfect candidate to walk in the door. It rarely happens and, even if it does, they will still need ongoing training to navigate the constantly evolving threat landscape. Plus, analysts turnover frequently. Addressing the cybersecurity skills shortage requires a strategic approach to training your staff and providing on-the-job training for skills development.
Your cybersecurity skills development plan should include four key items:
- Detailing your team’s specific cybersecurity skill requirements
- Conducting individual skills training
- Conducting team training
- Commit to a formal training schedule
SightGain brings emulated threats to your environment, so you can train with your production equipment to get the hard data you need to identify gaps in your attack surface, quantify risk, and uncover areas where security teams need additional training or upskilling. By continuously validating your security and evaluating your SecOps programs against real threats, you can pinpoint areas that need attention.
However, you need to go beyond just detecting potential security gaps and provide ongoing training and education for team members to stay sharp. SightGain’s live-fire training modules, for example, can put your team to the test against real-world threats in your environment. Safely executing malicious techniques on your production system, you can put the entire defensive system to the test and also find gaps in analysts’ skills. This goes beyond conventional SOC training by testing your team in your actual environment to measure the identification, response, and performance of your technology, processes, and people.
Customized Training Plans to Address the Cybersecurity Skills Gap
SightGain can then assign training modules. Rather than generic training, analysts get customized training plans based on their test results, helping to address an individual’s cybersecurity skills gap. SightGain prioritizes areas of improvement based on empirical data, which leads to more rapid skills improvement.
This process enables you to:
- Find areas of performance and non-performance within your operational context
- Deploy individual and interactive training to address areas of non-performance
- Customize curriculums, scheduling, and reporting for individuals and teams
- Track training activity and performance over time
- Validate competence and skills mastery
With customized training plans and embedded testing in your environment, you can better assess team performance and skills gaps. While lab-based simulations only test analysts’ knowledge and skills in generic environments, SightGain can test actual performance in your environment. You can emulate real-world and emerging threat scenarios to train your people, processes, and technology using the tools they use every day to ensure they are handling them appropriately.
SightGain is the only embedded cyber range solution to significantly improve response rates and reduce MTTR. You can also gamify SOC training to help keep teams engaged — rewarding digital badges for skill attainment and showing current/historical leaderboards.
Solve the Cybersecurity Skills Gap
The cybersecurity labor shortage isn’t going away anytime soon. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that the number of security analyst job openings will continue to grow by 35% through 2031 — nearly six times the average of other occupations. Solving the cybersecurity skills gap will require a commitment to ongoing training that quickly upskills your workforce on the skills they need to be successful in your environment. This can be best achieved by training them in your environment to ensure they meet your standards and are not wasting time on training that does not apply to your environment. This is one of the best ways to overcome the skills shortage and ensure you have the staffing with the skills you need to provide security and compliance services.
Upskilling your security teams and testing them against real-world threats in your production environment not only keeps teams sharp but also demonstrates to clients that you are going the extra mile to provide superior cybersecurity services. In today’s constantly evolving threat environment, it’s crucial to continue to train and educate team members on emerging threats and upskill teams to continuously improve security maturity.
Contact SightGain to get a demo and see how we can help you close the skills gap for your team.
