International hackers might be Canada’s one of the biggest cyber threat, but the country has a far more basic problem to tackle first. I.e finding and hiring the cybersecurity analysts to take them on.
Canada announced in October that it would be opening a cybersecurity centre in Ottawa.
But the few programs that exist in Canadian universities and colleges to train students in cybercrime are new, and graduates will be in huge demand for jobs around the world.
CATA cyber chair Katherine Thompson said, “The additional challenge is we have a very skilled labor force, and countries outside of Canada realize that”.
“We have a brain drain in terms of cyber expertise that’s rather shocking so a lot of folks that are headed to the U.S., the U.K., to Europe because they can make two to three times what they’re making here.”
A recent Deloitte study found that Canadian companies will be hiring over 8,000 cybersecurity experts over the next two years. And this isn’t just for Canadia only: the website Cyberseek reports that there are currently 313,000 open jobs in cybersecurity in the U.S.
“If you look at various studies, they say by 2021 the global shortage in skilled labor for cybersecurity will exceed three million,” says Thompson.
The importance of cybersecurity has been growing for years but got a huge boost when the U.S. said Russian hackers used social media to try to influence the 2016 presidential election.
CSIS director David Vigneault told a room full of economic leaders in Toronto said, “The scale, speed, range and impact of foreign interference has grown as a result of the internet, social media platforms and the availability of cheaper and more accessible cyber tools”.
“Using the internet, states or people acting on their behalf can mount attacks on your servers from almost anywhere in the world with no threat to personal safety and little risk of being caught.”
One international student Aarsh Joshi said, “Everybody’s always like, ‘You’re going to get a great job easily,’ and that’s because we do have so many openings and so many jobs waiting for us right now, even in Toronto, Canada”.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s U.S. or Canada. It doesn’t matter what they’re paying, as long as we are contributing to something, it’s always great.”
