Introducing G2’s New Cybersecurity Professional Development Category

G2 launched its Cybersecurity Professional Development category in September 2023. This category is a space to represent the growing number of products geared towards security professionals aiming to level up their industry-specific skill sets and gain more credentials.

A niche audience seeking specialized training

Unlike G2’s Security Awareness Training category, which represents products that train entire staff to mitigate security risks, the Cybersecurity Professional Development category is specifically designed for security professionals. 

Products in this new category offer specialized training for security analysts. Completing these courses either awards security professionals with credentials or immediately prepares them for exams that confer certifications upon receiving passing scores.

These tools offer courses to advance security professionals’ specific skill sets in ways that broader security training products cannot. These in-depth courses are designed to train security professionals of all stripes, including analysts, application engineers, and software developers. 

These products typically offer a variety of modules for each persona, including application development security, penetration testing skill development, and more. It is also common for these products to offer operating system-specific training, including Linux and Microsoft, as well as coding language-specific courses, such as SQL vulnerability training.

Due to the niche nature of the personas these products target and their specialized training modules, it was necessary to represent these distinct products in their own category to best serve buyers.

How it's different from technical skills development

Like cybersecurity professional development software, technical skills development providers deliver online courses designed to build a user's skills in software development, user experience (UX) design, AI, and cybersecurity.

These programs typically work by having users take a skill assessment to begin and engage in skill gap analysis so that the student can assess precisely what they need to improve and then take the course designed to impart that skill. 

However, the critical difference between cybersecurity professional development software and technical skills development software is how robust the learning platform is, with each skill being built and demonstrated via various projects.

Evolving security threats require advanced security training

The number of evolving security and data privacy threats organizations face, especially in the wake of AI and sophisticated phishing attacks, is alarming. To combat these increasingly complex threats, experts need to remain abreast of the latest security threats and best practices they can use to mitigate them. 

Having an entire category dedicated to products that allow security experts to hone their skills or develop entirely new ones enables them to strengthen their organization’s security postures while expanding their marketability as experts in their respective practices.

According to G2 data, the largest number of reviewers’ personas self-identified as “users” of the software directly. As these products are developed with security professionals in mind, it is then reasonable to assume these users are security professionals. 

The second largest reviewer persona self-identified as “administrators,” likely referring to security administrators. This self-identification represents a more specific identification for an end-user. These two roles, “users” and “administrators,” speak to the same target consumer—security professionals.

The number of reviews for cybersecurity professional development products surged in 2020, just as the world adjusted to working remotely. 

The change from physically centralized to necessarily decentralized work environments challenged security professionals, as they were suddenly burdened with implementing policies for remote work across their entire organizations. 

Many offices have since returned to in-person work to varying degrees, and the total number of reviews security professionals are leaving for products designed to improve their skill sets has not matched pre-2021 levels. However, buyers of all stripes continue to leave reviews at a steady rate, which was not the case before 2019.

Professional demand and market development warranted differentiation

Due to the demand for specialized cybersecurity professional development and the expansion in the marketplace of products that cater to security professionals’ interests, it was necessary to create a space within G2’s marketplace where buyers could find exactly what they were looking for. 

This category fosters faster connections between security professionals and the specialized products created for them. It allows highly skilled analysts, administrators, and other security professionals to consider user feedback from similarly skilled peers in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.

Remaining aware of the best security practices to thwart the numerous established and emerging threats that jeopardize organizations is much easier when these professionals no longer have to sift through products and reviews not directly related to honing security skills.

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This article is co-written by JaKayla Lathon, G2 market research analyst, education, real estate, and hospitality.

Edited by Jigmee Bhutia