I got to learn more about this industry through the opportunity provided by our school known as the careerSAdvance. This was one of the industries I participated in out of the 3 speaker series we got to choose from out of many different options (the other 2 shared in the respective sections as well). This was an extremely engaging sessions as I got to learn much more about the cybersecurity field compared to what I initially thought it was simply about.

Through this speaker series, I got to learn about firstly, the 4 biggest groups playing in the cyber threat "game". They include hackers, nation states, cyber criminals and mercenaries. I also learn that this is a field that would be predicted to continue growing in the next few years as there is a lot of room for potential growth. Currently, the increased accessibility and use of the internet meant that more people would be vulnerable to such breaches. However, with this increasing cyber threat is a massive cybersecurity skills shortage especially in ASEAN. This talent is thus highly valued and considered to have one of the higher starting median salaries compared to other popular industries like law and medicine.

Other than the salary that proves this would be a potential growing industry, another factor I learnt is the government investments. The government has also been putting in a lot of effort to aid research and development of data security capabilities. This will be an increasingly important industry to the public as we continue to increase our reliance on technology seen during the pandemic. Our use of applications like Singpass and TraceTogether would mean that our cybersecurity has to be at a certain level to prevent all these private information from leaking out.

In conclusion, this talk by Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) has allowed me to learn way more about the importance of cybersecurity and has enabled me to foresee that this would be one of the major industries emerging in the next few years. It would be something I am willing to consider when choosing a course I have to take in university.