{"id":215956,"date":"2026-05-18T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/18\/ai-is-making-it-harder-to-get-a-cybersecurity-job\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T18:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T22:10:15","slug":"ai-is-making-it-harder-to-get-a-cybersecurity-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/18\/ai-is-making-it-harder-to-get-a-cybersecurity-job\/","title":{"rendered":"AI is making it harder to get a cybersecurity job"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI is making it harder to get a cybersecurity job<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.marketplace.org\/story\/2026\/05\/18\/ai-is-making-it-harder-to-get-a-cybersecurity-job<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-18 18:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.marketplace.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. AI tools are helping bad guys automate bigger, faster, more sophisticated attacks. FBI data show cybercrime losses in the U.S. surged by more than 25% last year. AI itself is also being used to defend systems, but many organizations have chronically underinvested in security. And industry groups have long pointed to a gaping shortage of people with the skills to fend off hackers and phishers. Now, a lot of job-seekers trying to break into the field are hitting a firewall.Megan Osteen is one of them. She\u2019s wanted to work in tech pretty much forever.\u201cMy dad was a software engineer, and I just remember, a lot of my childhood, I would sit in his office with him, and he would explain to me what he was doing, like how it worked,\u201d she said.Life sort of got in the way of her plans. She left college when she became a mom and grabbed the work she could, most recently as a behavioral therapist for kids with autism. When her dad died a few years ago, she decided it was time to make a career leap. She kept hearing cybersecurity was the way to go, \u201cbecause of the projected job growth and the demand within the field. It seemed promising.\u201dShe took online courses and, in February, earned her first cybersecurity certification. She\u2019s been looking for jobs, but not finding many opportunities.\u201cI’m trying to find ways to keep pushing forward and not get stuck in the mud,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it has been truly just very, very difficult. I just feel like it was false advertisement.\u201dCybersecurity jobs have been the focus of a decades-long workforce development push: \u201cLearn to Code,\u201d but with the urgency of a national security imperative. It spawned a cottage industry of federal and state programs, for-profit bootcamps, certifications, and online career coaches like Evan Lutz.\u201cThe thing that initially gave me rise on social media is that I can speak very quickly with concise ideas,\u201d he said.Lutz quit his job teaching high school math in 2019 to launch a career in cybersecurity. He said it took him about five months to roughly double his income, and he\u2019s built a following advising others on his roadmap for success. But that roadmap has changed a lot since he started posting about it in the early 2020s. \u201cYou could literally have your Security+ certification in a month or two, and no experience and get a job making $60,000 a year,\u201d he saidDemand seemed insatiable; interest rates were near zero, tech was booming, and workers were in short supply coming out of the pandemic. But workers weren\u2019t the only ones who got the message, according to management professor Joseph Fuller at Harvard Business School.\u201cIf you are an innovative company, you’re looking out there and saying, \u2018You know, what’s worth a lot of money? Tools that mean companies don’t have to hire so many cyber techs because they’re hard to get and they’re expensive,\u2019\u201d he said.AI is increasingly taking over the routine tasks that junior workers once handled, like monitoring systems for anomalies and deciding which ones to prioritize for response. \u201cAnd you’re going to see that again and again and again,\u201d said Fuller, anywhere the labor market is signaling high demand.It makes it nearly impossible for workers to plan for a secure future, said Lisa Countryman-Quiroz, CEO of JVS, a job training non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area.\u201cThere’s almost a generation of people for whom the rug has been pulled out from under them,\u201d she said.When entry-level IT jobs started drying up, JVS pivoted to cybersecurity training last year. But Countryman-Quiroz said employers seem to be hiring for senior roles \u2014 people with the experience to be the boss of AI. The market is tough for people starting out, and she\u2019s not sure if they\u2019ll continue the program.\u201cWe are focused on moving people from poverty to the middle class,\u201d said Countryman-Quiroz. \u201cAnd there have been, for decades really, a declining number of opportunities that allow you to do that.\u201dJob-seeker Megan Osteen said she might have to go back to her old job in behavioral therapy while she plans her next steps.\u201cThere’s a lot of weight on it \u2014 financial weight, especially because I am a single mom and I did pause my career, pause everything, in order to pursue this,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to, you know, prove that I can do it too, like my dad.\u201dIn the meantime, she\u2019s putting her skills to practical use. She used AI to build a system that flags job scam phishing messages, which she\u2019s been getting a lot of during her search.Related Topics
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AI is making it harder to get a cybersecurity job https:\/\/www.marketplace.org\/story\/2026\/05\/18\/ai-is-making-it-harder-to-get-a-cybersecurity-job Publish Date: 2026-05-18 18:00:00…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":215957,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/img.apmcdn.org\/f384c76098f70a20f03f8b9c1ad21af0a1cb91ed\/widescreen\/b93980-20260518-a-person-checks-data-on-computers-2000.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,24,25],"class_list":["post-215956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai","tag-cybersecurity","tag-phishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215958,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215956\/revisions\/215958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}