Sarah Halzack

Talk to any talent professional in the Washington region and they’ll tell you cybersecurity jobs are among the most difficult for them to fill. Workers with the right skills are relatively hard to come by, and in a labor market dominated by the federal government and its contractors, they’re in especially high demand.

Now, the Rand Corp argues in a study that this problem will solve itself. Study authors Martin Libicki, David Senty and Julia Pollak examined existing studies on the cybersecurity workforce; interviewed government agencies, defense contractors and security firms; and looked at labor economics research to try to get a handle on the nature and scope of the cybersecurity worker shortage.

Based on that compendium of information, they predict that the high levels of compensation in this industry will be enough to lure more workers to its ranks. They predict that as the supply of these skilled workers increases over the long term, we won’t see the kind of eye-popping pay packages that we see for them now. The report forecasts that we won’t see cybersecurity pay dip below where it was in 2007, when a rash of high-profile Internet attacks made this field seem more essential. But they do predict that pay will cool off from where it is now.