Job openings for more than 10,500 cybersecurity positions were advertised by Alabama employers during the 12-month period that ended in April, and 1,788 of them were in the Birmingham-Hoover metro area.
Nationally, demand for cybersecurity jobs increased by 43% between May 2021 and April compared to a nearly 18% increase in demand across the entire employment market, and Birmingham is exceeding national averages when it comes to cybersecurity jobs, according to new data from CyberSeek.
"Emsi Burning Glass has been tracking cybersecurity jobs since 2012, and demand in the first four months of 2022 has outpaced anything we’ve ever seen,” Will Markow, vice president of Applied Research, said in a release. “Employers are desperate to find enough skilled workers to counter constantly growing digital threats."
According to a measure of the concentration of cybersecurity job demand in the Birmingham-Hoover metro relative to the national average, the area's demand is twice the national average.
There is also a greater employer demand for cybersecurity workers in the metro than there are workers. There are enough cybersecurity workers in the metro to fill 80% of the cybersecurity jobs that employers demand.
The Birmingham-Hoover metro cybersecurity workforce is estimated at 2,356.
Some cybersecurity job titles are more in demand than others. The top job titles in the Birmingham-Hoover metro, according to CyberSeek, include:
- Cybersecurity analyst
- Cybersecurity manager
- Penetration and vulnerability tester
- Network engineer
- Cybersecurity consultant
- Software developer
- Systems engineer
- IT auditor
- Cybersecurity architect
Broken down by NICE Workforce Categories, the majority of the cybersecurity jobs in the metro fall into the operate and maintain and securely provision categories. The third most popular category is oversee and govern, followed by protect and defend.
