The $80,000 entry-level job most American students are ignoring

The INSIDER Summary:

• According to Ashton Mozano, a cybersecurity professor at the University of San Diego, entry level jobs in cybersecurity have a starting salary of $80,000 or more annually.
• Many of these jobs go unfilled and it seems recent graduates are missing out on opportunity.
• With more cyberattacks happening, this job is more important than ever.

Each year, thousands of well-paying jobs go unfilled. According to Ashton Mozano, a cybersecurity professor at the University of San Diego, many entry level cybersecurity jobs have a starting salary of $80,000 or more annually; so why are we ignoring them?

Cybersecurity isn’t a sexy career for those with computer science or engineering degrees. Many are courted while still in school, and the bulk of each graduating class has its sights set on Silicon Valley. There, they’ll write code for Google, Facebook, or Apple. Only a few will ever pace a server room deducing whether a traffic spike is legitimate or the result of foul play by Russian or Chinese hackers.

But that could soon change. As a nation, we’re experiencing an era of unprecedented cyberattacks. From ransomware attacks locking down patient records at hospitals, to a mischievous hacker disabling the fare system for San Francisco’s Muni, it’s evident the scope of these threats is widening. Once reserved for creating commercial antivirus software or protecting sensitive data at financial institutions, today’s cybersecurity professionals are needed everywhere.

It’s unclear how many of these jobs there are, but it could amount to as many as 350,000. According to the San Diego Union Tribune, there are as many as 45,000 in California alone.

According to Forbes:

The ISACA, a non-profit information security advocacy group, predicts there will be a global shortage of two million cyber security professionals by 2019. Every year in the U.S., 40,000 jobs for information security analysts go unfilled, and employers are struggling to fill 200,000 other cyber-security related roles, according to cyber security data tool CyberSeek. And for every ten cyber security job ads that appear on careers site Indeed, only seven people even click on one of the ads, let alone apply.

And with the uncertain future of the H1-B visa for foreign workers, the gap could widen further in the coming years, pushing salaries for qualified applicants — those with a bachelor’s in computer science or computer engineering — skyward.

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