Growing Cyber Talent Through Public Private Partnerships 2025

Introduction The cybersecurity landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, bringing with it a wave of increasingly complex and sophisticated threats. These threats disrupt the provision of critical services, compromise sensitive data and erode trust across the public and private sectors. In fact, research shows that the cybersecurity skills shortage creates additional cyber risks for 70% of organizations.1 Even though the Future of Jobs 2025 report identifies cybersecurity as one of the fastest- growing skills in the next five years, the global cybersecurity workforce gap remains staggering, with estimates ranging from 2.8 million2 to 4.8 million3 unfilled positions. While the talent shortage is a global phenomenon, cybersecurity is unique due to its rapidly evolving threat landscape, the constant need for upskilling, the high stakes of protecting critical systems and data and the growing demand for experienced talent to handle increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats. The scale of the talent shortage in cybersecurity is further underscored by the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 report, which reveals that only 14% of organizations have the necessary skilled talent to meet cybersecurity objectives. It is important to note that the skills and talent shortage in cybersecurity is not uniform across all roles. Findings by Fortinet show that the most difficult roles to fill are in security operations and cloud security.4Although nascent in cybersecurity, public– private partnerships can be used to develop talent and create job opportunities. Taking a closer look at global cybersecurity talent distribution, data reveals that five countries alone – United States, India, United Kingdom, France and Canada – represent 61% of the world’s cybersecurity talent pool. The rest of the world accounts for the remaining 39%.5 This imbalance highlights how the cybersecurity talent market is largely concentrated in the Global North. Even though a report by Coursera6 reveals that cybersecurity is among the top five professional certificates in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and sub-Saharan Africa, the cybersecurity skills and talent deficit still remains particularly severe, with countries such as Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa among the most affected. Left unaddressed, skills and talent shortages can create significant challenges. Studies reveal that for 63% of employers worldwide, skills gaps will be the major obstacle to business transformation in the period 2025–2030 and are also likely to exacerbate cyber inequity – the disparity between those with the resources and capabilities to secure their digital environments and those without.7 Many organizations in the Global South lack the funding or infrastructure to attract, train or retain top cybersecurity talent. This lack in resources often results in brain drain, ultimately creating a continuous dynamic in which local expertise is lost, hindering efforts to strengthen digital defences. Growing Cyber Talent Through Public–Private Partnerships 4