DICT: 2 million jobs up for grabs for cybersecurity professionals

No college degree but tech savvy? A job in cyber security might just be for you, says Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Ivan John Uy.

With the pandemic forcing many businesses to shift operations or totally migrate online, and with the sheer volume of business going digital, online scammers and cyber criminals quickly jumped on the opportunity and have become more clever than ever. The digital economy has become the arena of a virtual arms race between cyber criminals and cybersecurity professionals—which has become a very lucrative job market.

According to Uy, there are 2 million job openings for cybersecurity professionals, with salaries ranging from a low of P200,000 a month, with those in the US making as much as $100,000 a year or roughly P500k monthly salary.

Part of the DICT’s National Cybersecurity Plan, already approved by President Bongbong Marcos, is capacity building and upskilling by offering cybersecurity training through the DICT-ICT academy.

The program will initially be for government employees but will eventually be offered to the general public, some courses for free, some for a fee.

“We’re also working with different providers, whether these are university, colleges, training institutes for them to possibly deploy some of the course content that we will curate that will allow them to learn more. And we’re also working with industry to provide those contents. So alam mo, maraming mga cybersecurity at mga providers like Google, Microsoft, mayroon silang mga certification programs, training and certificate programs,” said Uy.

The DICT head emphasized the great potential of the program for what he called, “mga tambay pero tech savvy (bums with tech savvy skills)".

“Can you imagine the economic opportunity that is now given to our sector of society who cannot afford to go to college. Now we’ve opened up a completely new window of employment that they can go into and earn a lot of money better than the college graduates.”

The National Cybersecurity Plan covers 2024-2028 and addresses the need to develop good policy in order to ensure a safe cyber landscape for the country.—RF, GMA Integrated News