In the spring of 2025, U.S. colleges and universities awarded bachelor's degrees to more than 2 million students. Now, a new class of graduates is preparing to leave school, collect their degrees and face the same difficult-to-read job market the previous group did 12 months ago.
These difficulties are especially true for members of the class of 2026 pursuing career opportunities in technology and cybersecurity.
A look at the high-tech Silicon Valley sector shows fewer opportunities for graduates, combined with a high level of instability. In recent weeks, Oracle announced it would eliminate 30,000 jobs, while Meta — Facebook’s parent company — announced 8,000 layoffs, or about 10 percent of its workforce.
While some of these tech firms are using artificial intelligence (AI) to fill entry-level IT and cybersecurity positions, many are slashing or reducing roles to readjust after hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic. This also means tech and cybersecurity professionals are moving more between jobs rather than staying at large tech companies for years or decades to stay ahead of layoffs and keep their skill sets fresh.
At the same time, however, there are signs of life within the U.S. job market for recent graduates. The Wall Street Journal reported that the National Association of Colleges and Employers expects organizations to increase new-graduate hires by 5.6 percent this year compared to 2025. Other research showed that unemployment among those ages 20 to 24 has recently dropped and that some high-tech firms, such as IBM, are planning on hiring more college and university graduates this spring.
These numbers indicate that recent grads can still find work in their chosen field, especially in areas such as cybersecurity, where there remains a significant need for talent. Within the cyber market, there are more than 500,000 open positions listed by private firms and government agencies within the U.S., with about half requiring a bachelor’s degree.
One significant issue hanging over this is the use of AI and how much these technologies will play a role in reshaping the roles of cybersecurity professionals.
While many organizations are attempting to leverage AI to assist in areas such as security operations centers (SOCs), which can affect entry-level roles, industry insiders continue to see a need for a workforce that is knowledgeable about what these technologies can do, how they fit into the broader business strategy, and how to deploy them effectively to increase security while reducing risk.
“It’s encouraging to see ‘signs of life’ in the entry-level job market, but we’re still in a reset phase,” Diana Kelley, CISO at Noma Security, told Dice. “AI is raising both the floor and the ceiling at the same time. It’s creating new roles in areas like cybersecurity, including prompt security engineering and AI red teaming, but employers are still looking for experience and proof of capability, even at the entry level.”
Other experts see a future with AI handling some functions, but a new generation of cybersecurity professionals overseeing how those tasks are handled.
“Dips in hiring at the junior level due to automation can result in fewer technologists reaching that long tenure. But, as AI technology matures and improves, it will soon achieve complex tasks such that tenure alone will matter less,” said Sumedh Thakar, president and CEO at Qualys. “The human-in-loop approach to AI is here to stay, and that will separate those with the expertise to guide, shape, and govern AI from those who will be replaced by it.”
As recent college and university grads look for work after collecting their diplomas, experts note that AI skills will play an increasing role in workforce readiness. Their advice is to learn as much as possible and demonstrate that working knowledge.
Why Recent Grads Need to Embrace AI and Cybersecurity
AI is changing cybersecurity, including how cybersecurity professionals — especially those right out of college — approach their jobs.
Earlier this year, Hugh Thompson, the executive chairman of the RSA Conference, noted that cybersecurity professionals are increasingly responsible for the safe deployment of AI tools and platforms — including governance — as well as ensuring that lines of business understand the risks associated with AI.
For this year’s graduates, AI fluency isn’t optional — it’s table stakes, said Matthew Hartman, chief strategy officer at Merlin Group.
“The entry-level market is tighter than it was a few years ago, but the big tech layoff headlines tell an incomplete story. As long as the threat landscape keeps expanding — and it will — so does the need for qualified people to defend against it. What’s changed is the bar for entry,” Hartman told Dice. “Employers are looking for candidates who can demonstrate hands-on experience and the ability to apply AI in practical ways. The graduates who stand out are the ones building and experimenting with tools and showing curiosity and initiative before they ever walk into an interview.”
Trey Ford, chief strategy and trust officer at Bugcrowd, believes that many entry-level cybersecurity jobs were already being eliminated before AI took off three years ago with the release of ChatGPT.
“The entry-level cyber job market isn't soft because AI replaced the work; it's soft because too many candidates trained for a version of the job that was already shrinking before AI arrived,” Ford added.
When it comes to the cybersecurity job market, Ford noted that while the layoffs at big tech firms such as Oracle and Meta produce headlines and anxiety in the broader economy, those with security backgrounds are still highly sought after in numerous other industries that are under threat from cybercriminals and even nation-state actors.
“The demand for these new grads often lives in financial services, healthcare, critical infrastructure, and defense,” Ford told Dice. “These are the sectors that don't make the layoff headlines but are actively competing for practitioners who can manage cloud risk, vendor access, and resilience programs.”
While AI advances have ushered in new business opportunities, attackers have also found ways to exploit AI for their own purposes. With the AI attack vector growing, there are job opportunities for cybersecurity professionals who are natively AI-literate, said Ram Varadarajan, CEO of Acalvio.
“For fresh graduates to be relevant, they really need to get steeped in the AI technologies that will fuel future attacks, and also the AI technologies that can be used to defend against such attacks,” Varadarajan told Dice. “With large language models, prompt injection, agents, moving targets, and real-time game theory, it’s forever going to be bot-on-bot attack versus defense.”
Grads Need Broad Skill Sets but Also Specialties
For students graduating and entering the workforce, Bugcrowd’s Ford noted that the candidates who get hired are the ones who understand that most cybersecurity risks lie outside the code. This includes understanding access patterns, cloud environments and configurations, and whether the organization can recover when something goes wrong.
It’s also a reason why a bachelor’s degree, coupled with a certification demonstrating additional knowledge and specialized training, can help in today’s cybersecurity job market.
“Security has always been more than vulnerability discovery. It’s about identity, cloud posture, supply chain access, and incident recovery,” Ford noted. “There is so much room to specialize in cyber that it creates a very long list. None of that is new. We just stopped teaching it.”
