We sat down with Eleanor Ezimah, a security engineer with more than six years in the field, to ask whether the cybersecurity skills shortage is real. Eleanor walks us through building a security program from the ground up with the CIS Controls, why budget and appetite for risk shape tooling choices as much as any framework does, and how AI has changed what hiring teams expect, from agent-building challenges in interviews to fluency with shadow AI. We also trade stories about getting one AI to talk to another, and Eleanor shares why she’s steering her career toward cloud and AI infrastructure security. This one is for security leaders trying to staff a team and practitioners weighing a specialty switch who want to know which skills hiring managers are asking for right now.
0:00:00 – Welcome and guest introduction
0:00:57 – Why the skills shortage conversation never goes away
0:02:10 – Building a security program from the ground up 0
:05:08 – How frameworks, budgets, and tooling shape decisions
0:08:46 – Generalists, specialists, and AI’s effect on the skills gap
0:12:04 – Shadow AI and AI expectations in job interviews
0:15:10 – Why hands-on tool experience still matters
0:19:25 – AI inside the tools: dashboards and “my AI talks to your AI”
0:21:59 – Eleanor’s next move: cloud and AI infrastructure security
0:24:16 – Wrap-up