Over the past two years, the workforce has changed in unimaginable ways. Hybrid work is now the norm, leadership strategies have evolved to encompass the new way of work, and workers are taking the time to decide if they actually like their job. We have witnessed the highest resignation numbers in decades – according to the World Economic Forum, 4.4 million workers left their jobs in September 2021 alone! However, the Great Resignation can be your Great Opportunity, especially if you are pursuing a career in cloud security.

The Great Resignation brings Great Opportunities

You have probably seen headlines about “The Great Resignation.” A Prudential survey says 26% of employees plan to look for a job at a different company once the pandemic has subsided. A Microsoft survey increases this percentage to 41%, and Monster.com says 95% of employees are considering a job change. The resignation rate is the highest ever reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics since they began measuring it in 2000.

There have been many articles written about the Great Resignation, many of them focused on the negative aspect of the trend. But the Great Resignation is actually a Great Opportunity. There is immense potential in all the kinetics of this movement. People are not resigning because they do not want to work but because they believe that there’s something better out there for them.

From an employer’s perspective, hiring and retention used to only be about how much a company paid. After the pandemic, that is no longer the case. Employees are not as interested in money as they used to be. They are more concerned with flexibility, work-life balance, development opportunities and overall company culture. And the most important, they want to be successful at the jobs they have. They want to be fulfilled. As the world of work changed, so did the expectations of employees. 

Cloud Security is Your Great Opportunity

As organizations are migrating data, applications, and services from on-premises data centers to the cloud, seeking to innovate, disrupt their markets and cater to their employees’ desire for flexibility, concerns about security in the cloud increase.

Businesses are facing many challenges trying to prevent data breaches in the cloud. According to the 2022 Cloud Security Report , the top three multi-cloud challenges include:

• Ensuring data protection and privacy for each environment (57%)
• Having the right skills to deploy and manage a centralized security solution across multiple cloud environments (56%)
• Understanding service integration options (50%)

The knowledge and skills gap are the biggest concerns for all cloud-first organizations, hence the demand for cybersecurity professionals with experience in cloud security increases. The following factors justify why the demand for cloud security professionals is at all time high and why this is your great opportunity.

1. Ensure business resilience by minimizing the impact of a data breach
2. Accelerate innovation to stand out from the competition and secure the future
3. Harden your brand name and increase customer satisfaction
4. Be compliant with an extended patchwork of regulations
5. Build a security culture
6. Foster employee retention by increasing satisfaction, building confidence, and reducing stress and burnout

Take Control of Your Portable Career

While you are on a quest for something better, now is the time to become something better in cloud security. Looking for a certification to demonstrate your knowledge in cloud security, you are often presented with two options – a vendor certification or a vendor-neutral one. Which one should you select?

Vendor certifications, like AWS Certified Security – Specialty, are great because they arm you with all the required technical knowledge to securely configure and administer the vendor platform. Vendor certifications offer the much required technical expertise for the specific platform. This expertise will help you gain respect in your present company, but what happens if you decide to move to another enterprise where their workloads are stored in another platform?

What you need is to become a fully rounded cloud security professional, to be able to securely manage any cloud environment with confidence. Whilst vendor certification is essential for technically proficiency of a platform, you need the broader cloud security context to become an effective cloud security professional.

Here comes the power of vendor neutral certifications, such as Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP), offered by (ISC)².

Vendor-neutral certifications like CCSP broaden your operational knowledge and helps you understand the big picture in cloud security. It demonstrates your experience in concepts like legal compliance, roles and responsibilities and alignment of security objectives with business goals. Vendor-neutral cloud security credentials not only provide a strong foundational understanding of key concepts, but certified professionals are also able to quickly learn and adapt to different scenarios, including working with software from a variety of different vendors in a multi-cloud environment.

On top of all these advantages, a vendor-neutral certification in cloud security like (ISC)² CCSP is a great asset to help you take your career into your own hands. Giving you many opportunities to find the job of your dreams (until the next one!), you can pave the way for a career that can be fully portable – opening up opportunities to be promoted, move to other organizations or, indeed, in other countries.

The following facts show the land of opportunities that lay ahead of you.

• 82% of hiring managers report cloud certifications to make a candidate more attractive
• A 2020 report from CBRE tracked the demand as a 12% year-over-year increase and said that the typical turnover rate is at 42% — well above the U.S. average for all tech skill sets, which is another indicator suggesting robust hiring demand.

And if you want to work abroad, having the CCSP certification will help you secure your cloud security role as it is one of the most well know and established cloud security certifications .

Want to learn more?

Take the next step toward cloud security certification with The Ultimate Guide to the CCSP . It covers everything to know about the world’s leading cloud security credential. Find out how CCSP and (ISC)² can help you discover your certification path, create your plan, and rise to the top in cloud security.