Cybersecurity workers in high demand during COVID-19 pandemic
- 💻 Security industry always has business as people are moving to new systems and facing new risks
- 💪 Mental models from other industries (e.g. knitting) can be applied in cybersecurity
- 📚 Skills such as librarianship are in demand for managing massive reference libraries
- 📈 Internet delivery companies expect increased demand due to physical distancing
- 🏡 Gigabit internet to home is more important than ever during pandemic
Transcript (raw)
(00:00) – I’m actually hiring right
now and we’re looking at possibly hiring a lot more
than we originally planned on. Partly, there’s a big opportunity here. As an Internet delivery
company, we expect to see some, a lot changes on the Internet. And if people are physically
distancing, that shows up in Internet consumption and that affects us.
(00:18) We all gonna wanna have
actual gigabit to the home, where that’s true gigbit
download, not a shared gigabit with all of my neighbors
who I hope aren’t home at the same time, ’cause now we know they’re all home at the same time. The security problems grow. Every time people move and
they jump to a new system,
(00:39) there’s risks that they just miss. And as a result, that’s
what the security industry basically is, is walk along behind and pick up after those risks,
either that people missed or that they just consciously said, “Hey screw it, I gotta get over there and I’ll clean up afterwards, but if I don’t get over there I die
(00:59) or I’m out of business,
you pick your metaphor. And that’s gonna make the
security industry always have business, effectively,
helping make people safer, because the goal of security
is to help build safe systems and safe systems help people move faster. Big thing in security is being
able to apply mental models
(01:19) from elsewhere to a
problem in front of you. So, if you have any skill
that’s a skill you can probably figure out how to apply
somewhere in security. Knitting, that’s just applied algorithms. So, if you think about errors
you can make while knitting, those are the same errors
computer systems make and the people using
computer systems make.
(01:41) We hire librarians because we keep massive reference
libraries of documentation about what people have
said their system does so that we don’t have to
go back and ask them again. And every year, we have to
update that and make sure it’s still fresh and
then provide it on-demand to our auditors and our other architects.
(01:59) That’s a librarian skillset right there. And libraries are probably
gonna see even more of a drop off in demand and
that was already a career field that was seeing a sort
of a slow layoff trickle for everybody with a LIS degree.