Demand for cybersecurity skills is asking for a mathematical impossibility?

[iSecurityGuru]

As we all know, there is an acute global shortage of cybersecurity professionals. I think a big part of this problem is on the demand side. As I wrote in my blog article,

Demand for cybersecurity skills is asking for a mathematical impossibility​

As I mentioned before in this article,

In this Information Age, changes are happening at an accelerating rate. There will always be new processes, new technology, new software, new hardware and new information coming in.

The work that you do will always be changing. Your experience will grow along with your work, even in the absence of training and development by your employer.
But there is one problem.

The specific configuration of experiences you gain will be unique to your company only. Since no two companies are identical, no two people with the same job title in different companies will have an identical configuration of experiences. In other words, you, along with many others, have become a unicorn.

This is especially true for technology workers.

Let me quantify the level of uniqueness of modern technology workers. In cybersecurity alone, there are 3,500 different specialisations. Let’s say in a typical cybersecurity job, employers are looking for experience in 5 different specialisations. How many permutations and combinations of 5 specialisations can you get from 3500 specialisations? Using this Excel formula, COMBIN(3500,5), I get 4,364 trillion! If I am looking for only 2 specialisations, the number of permutations and combinations drops down to 6.1 million.

In typical technology job postings, it is common to see employers demanding several to a dozen specialisations. For a dozen specialisations, this is the number of permutations and combinations:

6,922,787,977,494,940,000,000,000,000,000,000

No matter how you cut it, the demand for cybersecurity skills has reached a mathematical impossibility. That is the real reason why there is a skills '‘shortage’ in cybersecurity (and technology in general). The supply cannot be filled globally. It is a mathematical impossibility.