As businesses modernise and adopt cloud, automation and AI tools, they need professionals who can protect them against fast-moving threats, and that shift is putting cyber security at the centre of how teams work today.
Yet, 32 per cent of businesses cite a lack of specialist skills as a major barrier to their tech hiring, including the cyber security consultants needed to keep modern systems safe.
So, what exactly are employers looking for in a cyber security professional, and what skills should you put on your CV to get noticed?
Top skills
When reviewing CVs for cyber security roles, hiring managers are looking for the core basics that prove you can protect environments and respond when something goes wrong.
A CV should include at least some of the skills below:
- Network security
- Cloud security
- Security monitoring
- Incident response
- Vulnerability management
- Risk assessment
If these aren’t visible on your CV, either in a skills section or through previous experience, then you risk being screened out of the hiring process.
Frameworks and AI skill
Cyber security is as much about judgement and process as it is about the tools you use, and hiring managers want to see that you understand how quality fits into the wider business. The most popular skills include:
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework
- ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials
- Threat modelling
- Secure coding
- Data protection
- Automation and AI-assisted security operations
- Documentation and security reporting
How to stand out to employers
When it comes to making your CV really stand out, it’s not just about listing all the technical skills you have. What really catches an employer’s eye is seeing the impact you’ve made with those skills as they want to know how you’ve used them to make a real difference.
If you’ve helped teams work more efficiently through better monitoring, faster response times or clearer reporting, make that visible. Employers are also interested if you’ve experimented with AI to support threat detection or incident response because it shows you’re comfortable working with new and emerging tools. Whether you’re aiming for an in-house analyst role or a career as one of the cyber security consultants UK businesses rely on, this kind of evidence sets you apart.
Advice for an entry-level cyber security professional
Getting into a cyber security career can feel daunting, but demand remains strong as organisations look to find skilled analyst. If you’re just starting out, the key thing is to focus on showing that you understand the fundamentals and can use them in a practical way.
To keep pace with emerging threats, today’s and tomorrow’s aspiring analysts should be able to describe how they understand, and can align security to the NIST CSF, which is based on a defence-in-depth approach across six domains: Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover. The key thing is how your experience aligns to the new way of working, where automation and AI security ops is vital and where professionals working with agents and models are skilled on using tools with human oversight.
This demonstrates not only experience but also the passion that’s in demand for high pressure roles like this. Real work experience, including real incident experience, is also very important to show.
