A career change can be daunting, but for Gabrielle Hempel, it only took a few months. The former mechanic went from having no cybersecurity experience to landing a job as a security analyst at one of the world’s top consulting firms shortly after enrolling in Cybrary’s Security Operations Center Analyst program.
Hempel is just one of many success stories from the Greenbelt, Md.-based online cybersecurity and IT learning and career development platform, which aims to make careers in the field appealing and accessible to all, especially to women. It’s an important goal, considering that there are currently 300,000 open cyber positions in the United States alone, COO Kathie Miley tells us, and 3.5 million worldwide, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
Cybrary’s free training programs include 52 different career paths. For Hempel, it was the first platform she found that offers “separate career paths and that basically laid it out to say, if this is what you want to do in the future then this is what you need to study right now or these are the steps that you need to take.”
Once completing the free training that she first learned about on Reddit, Hempel signed up for a paid membership for $99 per month that includes more than 200 virtual labs, practice exams for certifications, simulated hacking events and mentorship. In three months she had completed the program and secured a cybersecurity analyst position at Accenture.
Hempel is now an assistant mentor at Cybrary, and emphasizes the importance of letting women know what roles in the industry are available to them.
“We need to stop scaring people, especially women, away from the field, and also just raise awareness that it’s an option,” she said. “I’ve worked in a male-dominated industry for the last 10 years since I was in high school.”
However, she wishes her all-girls high school had presented computer science as a career. “It makes me wonder sometimes where I would be at some point now if someone had encouraged me more to go for it.”
Miley agrees. She said the issue with women joining the cyber field is that “we aren’t doing a good job as an industry or even in our schools of making it attractive to women. We need to demystify the confusion. We promote cyber as being a 24-hour a day job that is relentless and around the clock, and a lot of women don’t look at careers that exclude the possibility of having a family.”
But that’s really not the case, she said. People in cybersecurity can still have lives outside of work. And coding is not the only job available. There are spots for policy analysts, for example.
“There are not enough men in the world to fill the open jobs in cyber, so unless the community starts embracing women, we’re never going to fill these roles,” she said. “It is a mission of mine to bring more women into the cyber field and Cybrary is the perfect opportunity to extend that to people.”
