Dissenting Research Argues the Security Workforce Shortage Is Overstated

This file records the counter-argument to 25-1209, because the corpus should not file a contested figure without the dissent attached.

Organisations report being unable to fill security roles. Candidates — including people with certifications, degrees and adjacent experience — report applying repeatedly without success, particularly at entry level.

A genuine labour shortage does not usually look like that. Scarcity normally produces rising wages, relaxed requirements and employers training people up. The dissenting reading is that what exists is not a shortage of people but a shortage of people who are already exactly what the employer wants, at the price offered.

At 25-1211, budget cuts overtook talent scarcity as the reported cause, with 29% saying they could not afford the skills they need.

"Cannot afford" and "cannot find" describe the same failed hire from different sides. That the two findings appear in the same body of research, and are usually reported as one story, is the strongest support the dissent has.

It does not account for the 88% of practitioners reporting shortages inside their own teams at 25-1209. That is a report of workload, not of hiring difficulty, and a labour market that cleared would not produce it.

Both things may be true: entry-level candidates cannot get hired *and* existing teams are underwater — which describes a market failing to convert available people into working practitioners rather than one lacking them.

This rests on argument and anecdote rather than measurement, which is exactly the criticism it makes of the mainstream figure.

It is here because this desk grades on evidence rather than on agreement, and because a corpus that discounts vendor telemetry at 26-0513 and leak-site counts at 25-1230 cannot then accept a certification body’s market-sizing without recording that somebody disputes it.