The US military is looking to hire 3,000 cyber security professionals over the next nine months.
In an in order to boost resources at its Cyber Command armed forces infosec unit, the command’s leaders recently successfully lobbied the US Government to rubber-stamp the hiring of 3,000 new workers to its 1100-strong workforce, which five years on is still not fully staffed.
According to IT News, head of the Cyber Command, Admiral Mike Rogers, told a US House committee last week that the unit had been built by “cutting manning to the bone” and “initially sacrificing vital support functions and institutional infrastructure to build mission capabilities as fast as possible”.
“Our command is growing and operating at the same time, performing a multitude of tasks across a diverse and complex mission set,” Rogers said. He had a target of around 6,200 personnel across 133 teams to be operational by the end of fiscal year 2016.
“We are already hard pressed to find qualified personnel to man our [cyber mission force] rosters, to get them cleared, and to get them trained and supported across all 133 teams,” he told the House committee.
“Where we need help from you is with resources required to hire personnel to fill the team seats as well as necessary operational and strategic headquarters operations, intelligence, and planning staffs, facilities where we can train and employ them, and resources to properly equip them.”
The 3,000 extra positions Rogers has been given approval to hire will span strategic and vulnerability analysis, incident handling and response, program management, cyber exercise facilitiation, vulnerability detection and analysis, network and systems engineering, and enterprise architecture, among other skills.
In recent efforts to boost cyber skills inside Government intelligence, GCHQ recently announced the launch of six and ten week summer schools, the former for A-level graduates and the latter for university students.
