The convergence of voice and video traffic are quickly transforming the growing complexity of networks at a torrid pace. IDC estimates that the skills gap in VOIP should grow to 19% by 2011.

This changing profile in the role of the network plays a key role in the skills shortage. Network enabled collaboration tools such as social networking apps and the Webex conferencing/collaboration solutions we use in our business each and every day are demanding a new set of IT skills to deliver business value.

My perspective is two-fold on this issue; the first is what I have seen in the resources we have attempted to hire! We give a very straightforward quick written/oral test to all new technical hires. This requires basic networking knowledge and some Unix commands. On average, (after filters from reputable recruiting firms, some with 5-10 years experience) less than 10% pass muster for the first filter we use in our hiring process. This is a troubling fact, which has cost us considerable time and effort to secure the right resources with competent skills. So I can say from our market assessment in a very strong technological job skills market, core Unix and networking foundation skills are slipping.

The second is that we as an IT Operations Management (ITOM) industry need to keep pushing hard to build better proactive and intuitive solutions to aggregate instrumentation from all Data Center tools, including more work around VOIP, video streaming, and collaboration so that we can ease this transition. If ITOM solutions become more proactive across the typical Cisco infrastructure that is commonly installed in the Data Center, we can free up some additional time for advanced “emerging technologies” training where existing IT workers can enhance their core skills and re-invigorate their careers. We have to do a much better job of getting our existing IT professionals trained on emerging technologies!

While there’s less that ScienceLogic can do around training, we certainly strive to do our part to enhance a day in the life of the networking engineers who use our solutions to simplify monitoring of increasingly complex networking, Wireless, VOIP, and collaboration needs.

He’s a bit indignant that so much energy goes to sporting events like the Olympics rather than more important news that isn’t getting reported around the world.

This is in a year when tons of journalists are getting laid off.

This is in a year when there are tons of stories around the world that aren’t getting reported on.

Could we take half of those photographers and send them to Russia, for instance

Reminds me of a feeling I had back in college as an undergrad student studying social sciences and humanities, about the way my friends who were physicists interacted with the world. They were so awed by the stars, Mars, astrophysics, and it seemed to me interesting but altogether unimportant. They argued they may find something outside our planet that could help solve Earth-bound problems like disease, or find the origins of earth and humanity — but really they were doing it because they loved it. One of my friends had a good argument, though — there are enough people right now that we can specialize in what we care about, and there will still be others covering other topics. He could be a physicist and look into the universe’s origin, while I studied social interaction and writing, and our other friends looked into solving cancer or eradicating invasive plants in the native wetlands. We have to specialize, and there are enough of us to do it too.

I think it’s the same way in journalism — whether it’s sports, celebrity journalism, or coverage of politics and war, there are a lot of opportunities right now for journalists. Of course the business model is changing, and some old-schoolers won’t know how to roll with that, but generations change slowly; we’re learning.

Also, the Olympics is seen as more than a sporting event, it’s also a symbol of world competition and cooperation too — a way for countries to come together and share entertainment globally. I think that’s worth covering.

In the second post, Robert Scoble says there are plenty of great journalists but the public doesn’t care. In some ways I have to agree with that, but I don’t think it’s negative, necessarily. I had a conversation with someone the other day about world news reportage. He says, “I was just reading this story, but what does it matter to me if there’s a flood in some city in another country I’ll never visit and some farmer lost his sheep?” World news is only important when it’s relevant, so it’s no wonder that many people don’t care — if they don’t know much about the area, and it doesn’t affect them, they have no incentive to give it full attention. You can call that apathy, but I think it’s an important selectivity skill that humans have. We have to choose what to give priority to, so if nothing stands out as being particularly important, we just ignore it or gloss over it. Human nature…

Also I think the common person today just gets desensitized and doesn’t know where to turn their energy, when surrounded by so many crises. Either you focus on one specialty and do your best to work toward one cause in your life — and maybe that’s just in the course of your daily work — or you become a complete Attention-Deficit-Disorder case and bounce from one problem to the next, without knowing how to solve anything. That just causes a sense of bewilderment, despair, and either that bogs you down or eventually you get desensitized.

There’s a commenter on Scoble’s blog, Spencer, who talks about this generation’s apathy. There are so many people who want to blame today’s generation or the young generation for this “apathy” that they sense. But I see it as a survival mechanism that arises from the way information flows these days. We’re surrounded by crises, everyone wants us to know about them — the water shortage, global warming, death in Iraq, the national deficit. Okay, crisis, I get it. But no one gives a real clear idea on what any individual is really supposed to do to solve the problem. You can’t get involved with one global cause, without ignoring all the others, and if you do get involved it’s likely to become your life’s purpose. Most people are concerned with other things — their families, their work, personal development, their homes and futures, and really that’s enough to take up all their time.

I’m always amazed when I read about the early unionists. Emma Goldman for example, the activist who pushed for the 8-hr workday, and campaigned for free love in the early 1900s when women were still wearing corsets, used to work 16 hour factory days as a seamstress, then lead meetings late into the night. Today we lead cushy lives comparatively–8 hour days, plus commute and lunch, family time, dinner time, gym maybe, sleep… but it still doesn’t seem like we ever have enough energy and time.

What Emma had that most people today don’t, is a community living in the same conditions as herself, with clear goals about what they were campaigning for, and a cause that affected their own daily lives. Today, unionism and local activism is in much shorter supply, in part due to the many people who work fairly comfy desk jobs, and the problem that everyone has his own specialization, works in a cubicle, does his or her own thing. The problems we’re facing today in terms of global warming, global water shortage, aren’t the same kinds of problems that activists have fought for in the past, and there’s no clear road map for how to solve them. Our leaders sure aren’t leading the way.

What we do have, at least, is the Olympics, which is an age old symbol of international cooperation, play and competition…so, uh, go sports! As for full disclosure, I don’t actually have a TV and haven’t watched the Olympics in many years, but I do try taking short showers–does that help?

We are regularly hearing from our security clients about their difficulties finding people with the right skills – or when they do finally find them, these people are too costly to employ because their skills are in such demand.

Indeed, the “unavailability of people with the right skills” was cited as a top challenge for security groups in both our enterprise and SMB surveys.

In comparing need for talent across 25 different IT roles, Forrester analysts came to the conclusion that information security experts are among the hottest roles in IT, sharing the top spot with information/data architects.

The skills shortage is likely to get worse before it gets better. We’re unlikely to see a significant spike in security experts’ salaries to attract those we need to hire: large changes in compensation for senior security personnel would run against the current of economic belt-tightening. Another typical approach to offsetting the shortage would be to train up: foster the career development and advancement of existing security personnel on our payroll. However, with all the outsourcing that is going on – and which will increasingly occur – there is a shrinking pool from which to find people with “the right stuff” worth championing their advancement.

We could look outside of security to others in IT, or even to co-workers in other departments or business groups. But given how poor a job IT Security does of marketing its value proposition, I don’t hold much hope for attracting non-security people.

What do you think? Are we about to hit a very big wall when it comes to skills and staffing? Are you presently feeling the pain of a skills shortage? Do you see such a shortage looming? What measures are you taking to acquire and nurture talent? Which ones are successful and why?

I welcome your thoughts on the topic.

Part of the problem is that good security people need to know the following skills:

• IT technology: since the data more often than not is in a computer, you need to understand them
• People technology: policies and procedures for managing people
• Business sense:  understanding that you’re supporting business goals
• And for Government:  politics

Back when I was PFC Rybolov, my battalion commander told me something along the lines of “The intelligence world is a hard job, you have to be able to out-infantry the infantry, out-mechanic the mechanics, out-radio the radio guys, and you need to know a language.”  Security is pretty much the same thing–you have to out-techie the techies, out-business the MBAs, and out-jerkify the auditors.  =)

Sound complicated?  Yes, it is, and it’s hard to find people who can do all this.  IT is an employment niche, IT security is a niche to a niche.  And there isn’t enough people who have the experience to do it.

So how do we mitigate the staffing shortage?  Here is what we are doing today in the Government:

• CyberCorps scholarship program for undergrads and graduate students with a minimum government service obligation.
• Using other career fields in “crossover roles”–yes, accountants can be used for some light security tasks.  Some things that we think of as security are really Quality Assurance and Change Control jobs that we have a vested interest in making work.
• Using contractors in some roles such as ISSO, ISSM, etc.
• Automation as much as possible.  Technical is easier, the policy and procedures side takes longer.  What you’ll find out eventually is that good IT management is good security management.
• Hanging on methodologies to “automate” the process side of security.

Now this is cool and all, but it’s hard to sustain and really hard to justify as a long-term solution.  In order to support the Government, we need to create more people.  Cybercorps is a start, but the need is so much larger than the supply that we have to consider better ways to create Government security dweebs.

Do we need Security Awareness and Training?  Yes we do, but much more than what is being provided (think system administrator training and procurement specialist training, not end-user training), and as an internal recruiting pipeline.  Still, I don’t think that we can recruit enough people to “the dark side” and that we need to look outside the Beltway for people.  Problem is that DC is such an insular community and we don’t speak the same language as the rest of the world.

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The interesting thing to me is the big question of certifying companies v/s individuals.  I think the endgame will involve doing both because you certify companies for methodology and you certify people for skills.

This is the problem with certification and accreditation services as I see it today:

• Security staffing shortage means lower priority:  If you are an agency CISO and have 2 skilled people, where are you going to put them?  Odds are, architecture, engineering, or some other high-payoff activity, meaning that C&A services are candidates for entry-level security staff.
• Centralized v/s project-specific funding:  Some agencies have a “stable” of C&A staff, if it’s done wrong, you end up with standardization and complete compliance but not real risk management.  The opposite of this is where all the C&A activities are done on a per-project basis and huge repetition of effort ensues.  Basic management technique is to blend the 2 approaches.
• Crossover of personnel from “risk-avoidance” cultures:  Taking people from compliance-centric roles such as legal and accounting and putting them into a risk-based culture is a sure recipe for failure, overspending, and frustration.
• Accreditation is somewhat broken:  Not a new concept–teaching business owners about IT security risk is always hard to do, even more so when they have to sign off on the risk.
• C&A services are a commodity market:  I covered this last week.  This is pivotal, remember it for later.
• Misinformation abounds:  Because the NIST Risk Management Framework evolves so rapidly, what’s valid today is not the same that will be valid in 2 years.

So what we’re looking at with this blog post is how would a program to certify the C&A service providers look like.  NIST has 3 viable options:

• Use Existing Certs: Require basic certification levels for role descriptions.  DoD 8570.1M follows this approach.  Individual-level certification would be CAP, CISSP, CG.*, CISA, etc.  The company-level certification would be something like ITIL or CMMI.
• Second-Party Credentialing:  The industry creates a new certification program to satisfy NIST’s need without any input from NIST.  Part of this has already happened with some of the certifications like CAP.
• NIST-Sponsored Certification:  NIST becomes the “owner” of the certification and commissions organizations to test each other.

Now just like DoD 8570.1M, I’m torn on this issue.  On one hand, it means that you’ll get a higher caliber of person performing services because they have to meet some kind of minimum standard.  On the other hand, introducing scarcity means that there will be even less people available to do the job.  But the big problem that I have is that if you introduce higher requirements on commodity services, you’re squeezing the market severely:  costs as a customer go up for basic services, vendors get even less of a margin on services, more charlatans show up because you’ve tipped over into higher-priced boutique services, and mayhem ensues.

Guys, I’m not really a rocket scientist on this, but really after all this effort, it seems to me that the #1 problem that the Government has is a lack of skilled people.  Yes, certifying people is a good thing because it helps weed out the dirtballs with a very rough sieve, but I get the feeling that maybe what we should be doing instead is trying to create more people with the skills we need.  Alas, that’s a future blog post….

However, the last thing that I want to see happen is a meta-game of what’s going on with certifications right now–who certifies those who certify?  I think it’s a vicious cycle of cross-certification that will end up with the entire Government security industry becoming one huge self-licking ice cream cone.  =)

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