The Department of Homeland Security to Hire 140 Cybersecurity Experts
The Department of Homeland Security is planning to increase its cyber-security workforce to 400 members by adding an additional 140 members by 2012. Phillip Reitinger, deputy undersecretary of the DHS’s National Protection and Programs Directorate, stated, “we plan to hire 140 additional cybersecurity experts by October 2012 bringing the agency’s total to 400.”
This is in part to President Obama’s recently proposed cybersecurity plan earlier this month. In the plan, the Obama administration released a cybersecurity legislative agenda that assigned the Department of Homeland Security as the lead agency in protecting federal agencies and the critical IT infrastructure.
This also follows a strategic agenda the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made over year ago when she stated, “Cyber-security is one of our most urgent priorities” and announced that The Department of Homeland Security plans hire up to 1,000 cyber-security experts in the next three years to help protect U.S. computer networks.
Many IT security experts have expressed the United States is vulnerable to a massive cyber-attack due to our reliance and dependence on the Internet; and industries such as healthcare, transportation, telecommunications, financial and energy to name a few are currently open targets.
This announcement presents is a great opportunity for African Americans per a recent study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce that was presented on a recent Black Enterprise web posting titled, “10 Highest-Paying College Degrees for African Americans”. The study investigates the economic value of 171 college majors and then goes even deeper to provide a breakdown of the highest and lowest-paying degrees by sex and race.
In the Black Enterprise article, 7 of the 10 highest-paying college degrees were IT and engineering related such as Computer Science, Computer Network & Telecommunications and Information Science to name a few.
You can view career opportunities with DHS here.