Back to School for Cybersecurity
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Hello!
My name is Drew Luper. I am 43 years old and I’m going back to school.
Why, you say?!
To make more money! :D Okay, money is a “nice-to-have” but it’s not the primary reason.
Let me explain:
The threat landscape is constantly changing and it’s one of the most challenging aspects of our daily lives, from malware, spyware, and social engineering to cloud hacking and ransomware, and we need to keep up as a community. Cyber attackers are constantly producing new tricks and employing complex attacks that use new delivery mechanisms such as macros and other legitimate application functionality to evade detection, hide the theft of data, and coordinate through command and control servers.
That’s one of the reasons why I enrolled at Western Governors University (WGU) for their Online Cybersecurity and Information Assurance Degree. After a thorough search, WGU offered the best bang for my buck as it’s totally online and you only pay per term, not per credit hour, so you can finish a class and start another without having to pay more.
I also have always wanted to complete my bachelor’s degree since I completed my associate’s back in the 2000s but always thought it was too cost-prohibitive, too intrusive to my now-dead music career, or any other number of excuses I came up with but now is not the time for excuses; now it’s time to GET SHIT DONE!
According to McKinsey & Company, the opportunity for cybersecurity technology and service providers will reach $2 trillion. “At the current rate of growth, damage from cyberattacks will amount to about $10.5 trillion annually by 2025 — a 300 percent increase from 2015 levels.” According to a recent survey by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 82% of employers across eight countries report a shortage of cybersecurity skills, and 71% believe this talent gap causes direct and measurable damage to their organizations. In the United States, there was a shortfall of almost 314,000 cybersecurity professionals as of January 2019, according to CyberSeek, an initiative funded by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE). To put this in context, the country’s total employed cybersecurity workforce is just 716,000. The number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs has grown by more than 50% since 2015, according to data derived from job postings. By 2022, the global cybersecurity workforce shortage has been projected to reach upwards of 1.8 million unfilled positions. All that said, it’s never been a better time to get into cybersecurity.
I’ll be updating this space further along my journey with insights and commentary on the process, my struggles and achievements, and anything else that comes to mind. So if you want to keep updated, follow along and leave me a comment or note and I’d be happy to discuss it here.
Thanks for reading and we’ll talk soon!
