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New data from a recently commissioned CyberCX report has predicted that over the next four years, Australia is expected to be left 30,000 cyber professionals short of the number needed to cover the security needs of the country.
In a 3AW radio interview, Katherine Mansted, cyber intelligence director at CyberCX, has predicted a shortfall of 30,000 cyber security jobs in the next four years, calling for the need to "rapidly upskill".
"We'll need a partnership between government, industry, also TAFEs and the university sector.
"We are going to need to rapidly upskill … we're talking for instance, TAFE programs that let people enter into the workforce more quickly than a tertiary degree and also industry academies."
In a recent Twitter thread, Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security Clare O’Neil has called for a migration program incorporating sponsorship for people with cyber security skills after taking part at the Albanese government’s Job Summit.
"We need to think about ways to include sponsorship opportunities for emerging jobs and industries that supports the development of our sovereign capabilities.
"We need a future that is Australian-made. One of those critical sovereign capabilities is cyber security," O’Neil said.
"The current situation represents a good opportunity to "better define and manage cyber skills across the workforce," O’Neil added, asserting that skills in the cyber security area are needed.
"Unless we have a thriving, diverse cyber skilled workforce, we will continue to suffer the high financial costs that cyber incidents impose on the economy and on us as individuals.
"If we are going to keep our economic miracle alive, we’ll need more help," O’Neil said.
While Australia has ramped up cyber security measures, Mansted further explained that "those increases are not keeping pace with the growth rate of cyber crime".
"We've seen exponential growth in cyber crime, year on year, since about 2019.
"We've got about 30,000 people — which is a huge amount of people — over the next four years that we're going to need to bring into this cyber security industry to make sure we keep pace with the rate of change in cyber criminal and nation state activity.
"Skilled migration is going to have a role … but the bulk of it is going to have to come from training and also reinvigorating the way we do training in this country," Mansted said.
[Related: Report reveals by 2032, industrial cyber security market set to be US$43.5bn]
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