The AI Cybersecurity Talent Gap: It’s Not About Staffing, It’s About Skills

In the wake of AI, the cybersecurity industry is facing a significant challenge, but it’s not the staffing shortage we often hear about. Instead, the real issue is a skills shortage. Organizations are struggling to attract and retain employees with the necessary skills to address emerging threats, while trying to upskill the talent they already have, particularly in areas like cloud security and generative AI security. The problem is not a lack of people, but a mismatch between existing skill sets and the evolving needs of the modern enterprise.

The traditional narrative of an empty talent pipeline is a convenient oversimplification. While recruiting is certainly difficult, a more nuanced look reveals that many security teams are not understaffed so much as they are underskilled. The modern threat landscape is a fluid and ever-changing environment, with attackers constantly adapting their tactics to exploit new technologies. This creates a critical need for defenders to evolve at an even faster pace. Take, for instance, the explosion of generative AI. While these tools offer incredible productivity benefits, they also introduce new attack vectors like prompt injection, data poisoning, and model exfiltration. Few security professionals today possess the hands-on experience to defend against these sophisticated and novel threats, creating a skills gap that cannot be filled by simply hiring more people.

Forrester Principal Analyst Jess Burn spoke with us about the AI skills shortage in cybersecurity and how security leaders can better upskill their teams to meet the challenge.

Why Traditional Training Isn’t Cutting It

Many security teams and individuals rely on traditional training methods like certifications, boot camps, and test prep courses to build skills. While these can be useful for foundational knowledge, they present major flaws in a rapidly changing threat landscape. This approach often leads to alert fatigue for human analysts. The root of the problem is that traditional training often provides only a “point-in-time” knowledge snapshot—a static view of a threat landscape at a specific moment, unlikely relevant to the production environment they work in daily. This knowledge quickly becomes outdated as attacker techniques evolve.

Let’s use an analogy. Learning to drive a car from a textbook can teach you the rules of the road and the functions of the vehicle. But can it prepare you for the split-second decisions needed to avoid a real-world collision on a busy highway? The answer is no. Similarly, certifications can prove a baseline of theoretical knowledge, but they do not prepare a defender for the pressure, ambiguity, and chaos of a live cyberattack. They do not teach a security analyst how to interpret a cascade of alerts, communicate effectively with their team under stress, or make critical decisions with incomplete information. For a mid-career professional to truly grow their skills, or for an entry-level employee to become a truly effective defender, they need practical, application based, hands-on experience that a multiple-choice exam simply cannot provide.

Beyond the educational shortcomings, these traditional training models are also inefficient and costly. Many boot camps cost thousands of dollars per person, making it unfeasible for security leaders to scale training to their entire team. Sending a few select employees to a week-long course is a start, but it leaves the rest of the team behind, creating further skills imbalances.

The Cyber Range Advantage: Homegrown Talent and Practical Skills

To address this skills gap, security leaders need to shift their focus from certifications to continual, practical, hands-on experience. This is where cyber ranges come in, providing the applied knowledge most training solutions lack today. A cyber range is a secure, virtualized platform that creates a realistic, intelligent simulation of a production network environment. Within this space, teams can practice and hone their skills against live threats without risking their company’s actual infrastructure. This hands-on approach is a game-changer for several reasons.

• Verifying True Skills: For leaders looking to hire, cyber ranges offer a better way to assess candidates than a resume or a list of certifications. By putting job candidates through a practical candidate assessment, an organization can see firsthand if they are a “doer” rather than just a “knower.” This helps identify true talent and ensures a new hire can immediately contribute to the team.
• Building a Talent Pipeline: Given the shrinking pool of experienced professionals, organizations must find a way to “home grow” their talent. Cyber ranges provide the perfect environment for this. New hires can be onboarded quickly by practicing on a realistic replica of the company’s network, getting familiar with its specific tools and architecture. Teams can also use the range for continuous learning, engaging in regular red team, blue team, and purple team exercises with in-depth training and attack catalogs to stay sharp and adapt to new threats as they emerge.
• Team Cohesion and Communication: A successful defense is not just about one analyst’s technical skills—it’s about the team’s ability to communicate and collaborate. A cyber range facilitates this by forcing team members to work together to identify threats, coordinate their responses, and share information under pressure. This builds the critical soft skills needed to function as a cohesive unit during a real breach. The experience of working together in a high-stakes, realistic simulation is invaluable and cannot be replicated in a classroom.
• Objective, Quantifiable Metrics: Unlike a pass/fail certification, a cyber range provides a wealth of objective data. Organizations can measure key performance indicators like time to detect, time to respond, and the effectiveness of specific actions. This provides a clear, data-driven view of a team’s readiness, benchmarking against industry peers and justifying ongoing investment to leadership. A cyber range helps you prove that your team isn’t just “training,” it’s getting measurably better.

Ultimately, the key to solving the AI cybersecurity skills shortage is not just throwing more money at training, but investing in a platform that allows for continual, practical, hands-on experience that can keep up with the evolving threat landscape. The future of cybersecurity training is application based and measurable, and cyber ranges are the platform to achieve this. To see how a SimSpace cyber range can upskill your security team to meet the demands of the AI threat landscape, schedule a demo today.