Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2022

Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has published their forth summary of research into the UK cyber security labour market. The research explores the nature and extent of cyber security skills gaps (people lacking appropriate skills) and skills shortages (a lack of people available to work in cyber security job roles) using a mixture of:

• Representative surveys with cyber sector businesses and the wider population of UK organisations (businesses, charities and public sector organisations – with this summary focusing on businesses)
• Qualitative research with recruitment agents, cyber firms and large organisations in various sectors
• A secondary analysis of cyber security job postings on the Burning Glass Technologies database, as well as recruitment pool data originating from the Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA)

This work is part of the government’s £2.6 billion National Cyber Strategy to protect and promote the UK online. In particular it informs the government’s work to strengthen the UK’s cyber ecosystem by enhancing and expanding the nation’s cyber skills at every level.

This report on the cyber security labour market is in line with many of the key messages from previous years. This year, on top of the skills, training and recruitment challenges from before, this labour market is undergoing a significant expansion, further straining employers’ time and resources after the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main lessons are as follows:

• Across the economy, it is still common to find skills gaps in basic technical areas. Alongside this, skills gaps around incident management are increasing
• While cyber sector businesses also continue to grapple with technical skills gaps, a lack of complementary skills among job applicants has become a more significant problem this year
• With the increasing demand for cyber skills, it is more important than ever that cyber employers and job applicants understand training needs, and can identify high-quality external training
• There is early-stage evidence of increasing recruitment of career starters and improvement in some aspects of workforce diversity (both in the cyber sector). Further years of data will help to validate both these trends
• The impact of the pandemic continues to be felt by cyber employers and cyber teams. In particular, it may have led to higher market rate salaries outside London and the South East, presenting challenges for smaller, regional employers

The full report is available here.