CyberSecurity industry is one the best paid industries in the world right now. Skilled security professionals are earning six figure salaries per year. The increasing number of cyber attacks and security threats has played a big part in rising demand of security professional in the United States. Currently, there are around 209,000 unfilled cyber security jobs in the United States – which includes both government and private sector. Private sector is suffering the most in the United States as a result of this unfilled demand.





According to Forbes; the expected growth in cyber security industry is 126% in next four years. It means there is also a big spike expected in cyber security jobs. But not every cybersecurity professional can earn big money as the result of this spike in demand – those who possesses the right set of skills can take advantage of these opportunities.

There’s a big number of IT Professionals who have jumped ships and started a career in Cyber Security. Security industry jobs are paying much better in compression to IT industry. But what security skills IT Professional should master himself in order to fill those unfilled cybersecurity jobs and start earning at-least 10% more than what they are earning right now.

Here are the top 5 highly demanded and best paid cybersecurity skills:

Threat Intelligence/SOCs

Threat Intelligence or Security Operations Center Professionals (SOCs) is the most in-demand security skill. Large organizations typically outsource the SOCs to managed security service providers or professional services companies. Threat intelligence represents the force multiplier to organizations who needed to update their response and detection programs to handle the modern and sophisticated cyber threats.

Cloud Security Specialists

Cloud security is a fast growing market and cloud security specialists are highly in demand right now. According to the Security Market report the cloud security market size will grow to $ 9 billion by 2019. As every major organization is moving their data to private, public and hybrid clouds the demand of cloud security specialists are increasing every year.

Big organizations like JP Morgan, Chase, Target, Home Depot has experienced data breaches in recent times bring every major organization on their toes to address this issue. Cloud security is no longer an IT issue it’s now something that is discussed in almost every organization boardroom meeting regularly.

Product Development - Security software and security infrastructure developers

The demand of professionals with skills in development of software and infrastructure development are highly in demand right now. The need of these professionals is essential for organizations who want to develop internal technologies for in-house use or selling purposes. The vehicle hacking last year showed the lack of skilled security infrastructure developers is affecting every industry.

These security professionals are needed to guide the product development teams from the start in order to build solid security architecture. Some of the technology is not necessarily public-facing, he says: some of the development work is in authentication technology or encryption. Businesses need to look at their reliance on software and consider the importance of secure development to their organization and customers.

Big Data Analysis

It’s a fact that big data bring big security problems for organizations. That’s why the demand of professionals with these skills are highly in demand right now. But still the gap between demand and supply is increasing – what’s the reason? Lack of professionals in the market right now..

Demand for analysts who are knowledgeable about Python, a programming language based on C and C++ languages, has grown 300% between 2010 and 2014. There is also a rise in demand of professionals who have skills in Apache Hadoop open-source programming framework for big data analysis and MongoDB, which delivers fast query speeds across large volumes of data.

Cyber Security Auditors

CyberSecurity auditors are earning an average salary of $78,000 in the United States but there’s a large number of security auditors vacancies which remain vacant. If you have knowledge about IT and Finance you can have a career in this field. The demand of Cybersecurity auditors are increasing every year and with the industry booming every year – this is just what you are looking for.

According to a survey by PayScale, the Salaries of relatively inexperienced workers fall in the neighborhood of $61K. When you compare it with IT industry or other sector – they are paying nowhere near what you can earn in security industry. The only thing a person needed to succeed are the skills which are highly in demand.