If you are an out-of-work IT person looking for your next challenge, I have a suggestion: Go study information security and pursue some sort of certification like a CISSP.

According to ESG Research, 22% of mid-market (i.e., 500-1000 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1000 employees or more) believe that they have a problematic shortage of information security skills within their IT organizations. Furthermore, of those organizations planning on hiring new IT staff positions in 2011, 35% plan to hire for information security positions.

This data doesn’t surprise me one bit. Security professionals are always in demand, even during the depths of the recent global recession. Combine today’s malicious threat landscape, multiple security vulnerabilities, and IT complexity, and we need all the security help we can get.

Related posts:

1. Server Virtualization Security: A Lot More Work Is Needed
2. Note to Washington: You Own the Information Security Communications Gap
3. The Security Industry Needs to do More Around Web Threats
4. 2010: Will Cisco Minimize or Invest in Information Security?
5. Security Spending Segmentation

Tags: 2011, CISSP, cyber security, information security, ISC2, IT