critical cybersecurity skills gap trends for 2025

Want to stay ahead in 2025? Here's HTB's take on the top trends shaping skills gaps in cybersecurity industry (and how your team can adapt to the changes ahead).

Hack The Box (HTB) supports over 1,500 global teams at the frontlines of incident response and security testing. This gives us unique insights into the skills gaps plaguing cybersecurity teams and how they’re adapting to a volatile threat landscape.

While predicting the future isn’t an exact science, we’ve identified five key trends poised to shape cybersecurity in 2025.

These trends highlight the most in-demand skills and actionable steps teams can take to close critical gaps and stay ahead of emerging threats.

The first big trend we’re watching in 2025 is that companies and recruiters will place less emphasis on degrees and focus instead on skill-based hiring. 

That is, looking less at college degrees, and more on practical capabilities that job seekers can be tested on or provide portfolios for.

Intelligent.com reported that nearly half (45%) of the 800 US-based companies they surveyed plan to replace their job ads’ Bachelor’s Degree requirements with skill-based ones in an effort to get a more diverse workforce. 

This, paired with a recommendation to seek skill-based applicants from the White House’s National Cyber Director, points to an upcoming shift in how security teams hire talent. 

Based on HTB’s own Cyber Attack Readiness Report (CARR) 2024, we’ve also found that more than 67% of cybersecurity teams use certifications or hands-on labs to benchmark skills, which underscores that more and more security teams are focusing on practical skills and certs over theoretical training and traditional degrees.