Research has found that salaries for cybersecurity specialist roles in Scotland have seen a fall so far this year.

Conducted by recruitment firm Randstad, the research found that in 2020 the “best” cybersecurity specialists in Scotland were earning £72,700 a year. However, these average salaries dropped to £70,200 – a fall of around 3.5%.

England and Ireland saw a marked increase in job role salaries, with England seeing average pay of top cybersecurity staff increasing by 0.5% over the year, from £70,800 per year to £71,300.

Overall, average pay for all cybersecurity professionals rose from £54,300 to £60,300 in England and from €41,700 to €41,800 a year in the Republic of Ireland.

But in Scotland, the median average cybersecurity salary fell 1.3% from £60,400 to £59,600.

Commenting on the research, senior director of operations at Randstad Adrian Smith said: “Edinburgh and Glasgow certainly have an appetite to become world-leading centres for tech but the salary figures don’t lie.

“They reflect changes in supply and demand. The high-flying jobs that power that top quartile of high cybersecurity salaries are just not there.

“Given how high inflation is currently running, a fall of 3.5% looks even worse in real terms.”

The Midlands – particularly in Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Mansfield, Northampton and Nottingham – saw significant increases for the top quartile of cybersecurity staff at over 8%, with average salaries up from £60,800 to £66,100 a year.

Recommended

• Why are IT leaders so scared of nation state cyberconflict?
• New platform hopes to boost ‘digital footfall’ for Scotland’s high streets
• Attracting and recruiting neurodivergent talent

This is in contrast to optimism before the pandemic that cybersecurity salaries would rise, despite the potentially negative impact of Brexit.

In 2018, a salary survey found that pay for cybersecurity professional would rise by 7%. In May of that year, a second survey conducted by Acumin Consulting found that average salaries in the UK’s cybersecurity rose 6.3% from 2017 levels – more than double the national average at the time.

However, in 2021 the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic appears to now be negatively affecting cybersecurity salaries, despite an increase in cyberattacks taking place through 2020 and into this year.

Additionally, a slow uptake of cybersecurity systems being embedded into business culture has slowed cybersecurity recruitment.

In March, the UK’s cybersecurity agency chief executive Lindy Cameron agreed that cybersecurity was “still not taken as seriously as it should be” and was “simply not embedded into the UK’s boardroom thinking”.

Smith said that Brexit may not be having as much of an impact as we may believe: “It would be easy [to blame] salary falls in Glasgow and Edinburgh [on] losing business to the EU post-Brexit.

“But cybersecurity is a booming sector in England and if this was all the fault of Brexit, we wouldn’t be seeing salaries rising in the North West of England, in Yorkshire & the Humber, the East Midlands, or in London.

“The truth is, the best cybersecurity jobs are being created south of the border and that’s unbalancing supply and demand, driving up pay.”