When Inconsistency Creates Uncertainty in the Cyber Employment Market
Inconsistency creates uncertainty.
You can see it across the cybersecurity employment market.
Cybersecurity is still a relatively young profession compared with established professions where roles and occupational boundaries have developed over decades. Cyber work has expanded extraordinarily quickly, and organisations have built their cyber functions in different ways.
The same job title can mean very different things from one organisation to another.
A Cyber Security Analyst might work in a SOC in one organisation, focus on vulnerability management in another, and have a strong governance, risk or compliance component somewhere else.
The title is the same.
The work isn’t.
This isn’t necessarily surprising.
Organisations have developed their cyber capabilities at different times, in different ways and according to different needs. Some have mature, highly specialised teams. Others are still building their cyber function. Some roles are narrowly defined, while others bring several areas of responsibility together.
Uncertainty
The employment market naturally reflects that development.
But it can create uncertainty.
Uncertainty surrounding the specialist cyber workforce is not a new observation.
For employers, defining a cyber role can be surprisingly difficult. What should the role be called? What capabilities are actually required? What experience should a candidate have?
For candidates, there is a different set of questions.
What does this job actually involve?
What will I be expected to do?
Is it technical, operational, governance-focused, or a combination of several areas?
And why can two organisations advertise apparently similar cyber roles while asking for quite different things?
Where Job Descriptions Matter
Everyone talks about the job title.
But the Job Description is what actually defines the work of the job.
The work defines the capabilities.
If an organisation needs a Cyber Security Analyst, the title alone does not tell us what that person will actually do.
The Job Description does.
It might describe a role focused on vulnerability management.
It might describe a role with strong governance, risk and compliance responsibilities.
It might describe SOC monitoring and incident response.
It might combine several of these areas.
A cybersecurity job title can be ambiguous when the underlying work and required capabilities are not clearly defined. An organisation may simply have a particular need and has chosen a title that broadly describes the person it is looking for.
The Job Description is where that need becomes visible.
It tells us what work the organisation needs performed, what responsibilities the person will have and what outcomes they are expected to deliver.
And once the work is defined, the skills and capabilities required to perform that work become much clearer.
That is the important connection.
Categories can add another layer of ambiguity.
Cybersecurity roles are often placed under broad or differing employment categories, with similar roles appearing under IT, Technology, Cybersecurity, Risk or Information Security.
This can make it harder for candidates to find relevant roles and can also affect how the position is understood in the market.
Consistent categorisation helps make the role more visible and easier to understand.
The job defines the work. The work defines the capabilities.
This is why the Job Description matters so much in the cyber employment market.
It provides the detail behind the label.
Two organisations can use the same job title and have genuinely different requirements. The JD is what allows us to see the difference and understand why different skills and capabilities may be required.
Perhaps the answer isn’t to make every cyber job look the same.
Perhaps it is to make the differences easier to understand.
Employers will continue to have different needs. Cyber functions will continue to evolve. New cybersecurity roles will continue to emerge.
The objective should not be to remove that variation.
It should be to bring greater clarity to it.
For candidates, that means looking beyond the job title to understand the work and the capabilities required.
For employers, it means being clear about the work they actually need done and the capabilities required to do it.
And for the employment market, it means moving beyond the question:
“What is this job called?”
to the more useful question:
“What does this person actually need to be able to do?”
Inconsistency may be inevitable in a rapidly developing profession.
Uncertainty does not have to be.
@UBIS Cyber Careers Australia
www.ubis.com.au
specialist cybersecurity technology jobs platform
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