AI Is Not Killing Cybersecurity Jobs — It’s Raising the Bar 

The Short-Term & Long-Term Job Market

In the short-term, my colleague was right. The bottom of the market is getting hollowed out. Helpdesk roles, Tier-1 SOC analysts, and generic tech support are increasingly handled by AI-driven playbooks and automated tools.

In the long-term, I’m right. The cybersecurity landscape is expanding in complexity. We need defenders who can secure cloud-native infrastructure, harden AI models, validate outputs, and investigate machine-augmented threats. That work doesn’t disappear — it evolves.

Remember the good old days? Like in 2022, when anyone could get a few certs and land a $60k remote job in 6 weeks? Those days are gone. Now the market is changing, and I’m changing with it.

This isn’t job loss. It’s job elevation. The entry-level bar has moved up. 

The new frontline doesn’t start with resetting passwords — it starts with reviewing Splunk dashboards, tuning cloud policies, scripting enrichments, and understanding what “normal” looks like in a hybrid SIEM. 

Cloud Security as a Default, Not a Niche

The market isn’t asking if you’ve “seen the cloud” — it’s assuming you live in it. IAM misconfigs, privilege drift, and log visibility across Azure/AWS are now starter tasks. If you can't audit policies or spot misused roles, you're not ready.

Here are a few other things to be prepared for:

• AI-Enhanced Analysts Are the New Norm: AI is not the enemy — it’s your co-pilot. You need to know how to work alongside SOAR tools, script enrichments, and parse AI-generated summaries critically. The analyst of 2025 doesn’t just respond to alerts — they curate, correlate, and refine the response logic itself.
• Playbook Execution Is Table Stakes, Logic Building Is Gold: It’s not enough to follow Tier 1 runbooks. You need to understand why each step exists — and how to rewrite those playbooks when attackers adapt. If you're not thinking in MITRE TTP chains and IOC enrichment flows, you're behind.
• Cognitive + Strategic Fluency > Just Technical Chops: The best analysts don’t just know commands — they know how to think. Chain of Thought. Chain of Reasoning. Bias Mitigation. These aren’t buzzwords — they’re how you survive when a “weird login” turns out to be lateral movement from a zero-day. And that’s exactly why we rebuilt the pipeline. Not just to teach commands — but to train thinkers.

Good-Bye To All That

Here’s the bottom line. Yes, the lower-tier grunt work is disappearing. No, cybersecurity isn’t dying. It’s leveling up. The winners will be those who work with AI, not those who are replaced by it.

If you’re preparing for a world that no longer exists, AI will eat your job. But if you're building for where cyber is headed — cloud-native, automation-aware, and threat-smart — you'll be the one feeding AI its inputs.

The defenders are not being replaced. They’re being promoted.