Career Information

The cybersecurity profession has a wide range of positions from very technical to very managerial and policy oriented. Not only are there many openings, as with other high-tech fields, the cybersecurity profession pays well above the average salary for the United States. The program will prepare students to enter an organization and immediately have an impact in terms of securing their systems and network.  The program will expose them to common vulnerabilities and how to find and mitigate them. Students will be introduced to the concept of risk management as it is not possible to have an organization become 100% free of any possibility of a cybersecurity incident. Organizations must be proactive and do their best to protect their systems up front, but be prepared when their best efforts fail. A huge part of cybersecurity, often not understood by students when then enter the workforce, is to manage risks and to be prepared to respond to an incident when one occurs. Business continuity is an essential part of an organization’s cybersecurity preparedness, and the courses in the Cybersecurity program will ensure that students understand how to prepare organizations so that they can stay in business no matter what security incident may hit them. 

The cybersecurity field is tremendously understaffed with over 760,000 open, unfilled positions as of December 2022.  This does not include the more than 1.1 million individuals currently in cybersecurity positions. Wyoming has a need for cybersecurity professionals as well. According to Cyberseek.org, who maintains a map with the current number of open cybersecurity positions, Wyoming and the states around it have the following number of open, unfilled positions as of December 2022.

• Wyoming: 722
• Idaho: 6,750
• Utah: 9,668
• Colorado: 26,800
• Nebraska: 5,306
• South Dakota: 1,672
• Montana: 1,043