The Landscape of Technology Jobs in San Diego

Colleges Adding Cybersecurity Courses

San Diego Union Tribune, April 9, 2018

Focus on providing trained workers for an industry in need

By David Garrick

SAN DIEGO

Facing thousands of unfilled jobs, San Diego’s rapidly growing cybersecurity industry is boosting its cooperation with local colleges and universities to keep more well-trained graduates in the area.

Colleges and universities have been steadily expanding their course offerings and now produce roughly enough workers to fill local cybersecurity jobs, but as many as three-quarters of local graduates leave for Silicon Valley or the East Coast.

So with help from the nonprofit Cyber Center of Excellence , industry leaders and the academic community are expanding apprenticeships, internships and recruiting efforts before students finish their coursework.

“If you wait until they graduate to grab them, it’s too late,” Ken Slaght, the nonprofit’s president, said by phone. “We’re also competing with companies like Google, and everybody thinks it’s very cool to work for Google."

Those stepped-up efforts aim to help the San Diego region’s more than 100 cybersecurity firms find workers for an estimated 4,200 unfilled jobs in the industry, where entry-level positions pay as much as $80,000.

Filling those jobs would increase the industry’s economic impact, which was recently estimated at $2.37 billion per year by the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation.

Perhaps more importantly, filling those jobs would also help local firms be more prepared for the growing threat of a cyber attack. Recent high-profile victims of such attacks have included the U.S. National Security Agency and the Democratic National Committee.

In San Diego, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command — a division of the U.S. Defense Department known as SPAWAR — employs 3,390 cybersecurity workers, according to the analysis by the economic development corporation. That’s nearly half of the 7,620 total jobs in the region, with the 4,230 not working at SPAWAR sprinkled across 104 private firms that include ESET, LP3-SecurIT, Security on Demand and iNetwork.

The number of local jobs has increased nearly 15 percent since 2014, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Many businesses and government agencies not in the cybersecurity industry have begun to hire in-house cyber analysts because they’ve become increasingly concerned about the growing threat that hackers pose to their businesses.

Officials estimate such jobs may total 2,800, a number expected to grow quickly in coming years.

“Any business has some element of cyber,” Chris Simpson, director of the National University Center for Cybersecurity, said by phone. “Some companies don’t take it seriously, and some companies just aren’t sure what to do.”

Simpson praised the enhanced cooperation between the industry and local academia, which has included round-table brainstorming sessions featuring college deans and chief executives of local cyber companies.

He said National University manages to keep more of its graduates in the area with a strong career services office and an advisory board made up of local industry leaders.

“We’re always reaching out to local businesses and letting them know about our program,” Simpson said. “We go over our curriculum with them, and they give us advice of areas we need to cover and things that maybe we need to change to keep our program fresh and robust.”

National University also benefits from many of its part-time cyber professors being employed in the local industry. In addition, many students already have cyber jobs and are taking classes for a promotion or to switch to a different area of cybersecurity.

“We’ve had professors hire their students, and we’ve had students hire their classmates,” Simpson said.

Other schools with cyber programs include the University of California San Diego, San Diego State University, University of San Diego and several community colleges. In addition, some local high schools offer apprenticeships for entry-level cyber jobs.

Areas of focus include threat detection, threat prevention, risk management, database management, incident management and compliance and audit.

david.garrick@

sduniontribune.com

(619) 269-8906

Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick