After seven straight quarters of recording no joblessness among IT security professionals, an unpublished U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggests a small number of information security experts are out of work and looking for jobs in the field.
BLS each quarter creates tables that breakdown employment data for 535 occupation categories but doesn't publish them. They're available on request. The tables show a 3 percent unemployment rate for the fourth quarter of 2012 and a 0.9 percent jobless rate for the entire year among information security analysts, a catchall occupation category for professionals with a variety of IT security skills.
All organizations are at risk, as there not enough people with the right skills.
The data in the tables come from the government's Current Population Survey of American households that produces the monthly unemployment rate, but the sample size is too small to be deemed statistically reliable because very few households have someone living in them who works in IT security. BLS Economist Karen Kosanovich explains that occupations such as information security analysts with a base of fewer than 50,000 individuals for annual averages and 75,000 for quarterly averages don't meet the bureau's publication standards.
Still, they're worth noting, and each reader can decide whether to believe these numbers or not. I've been tracking IT employment trends for more than a decade, and historically the BLS numbers have been indicative of IT employment.
With that caveat in mind, let's look at what's in the table.
The fourth quarter table shows the number of people who consider themselves IT security professionals - the IT security workforce - reached 65,000, which includes 63,000 employed and 2,000 unemployed. That would produce an unemployment rate of 3 percent.
read more.........http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/3-unemployment-among-infosec-pros-p-1400