Small Business Doctor

If you want to work in a highly specialized field, you will almost certainly be working for a big organization. The caveat here is that you might be employed by a small firm, but that small firm will almost certainly be captive to the big organization(s) that pay for its services.

Why are highly specialized jobs highly concentrated within big organizations?

Because worker skill specialization is akin to a company moving down the value chain. Moving down the value chain, whether for a worker or a company, increases the utility for exclusive specialization.

Big organizations specialize in specialization and complexity. Highly specialized workers also specialize in specialization and complexity. Not only does this make for a match made in heaven. This makes big payouts possible for in-demand specializations.

At each step along the value chain the incremental cost for a product increases. As you move towards the downstream part of the value chain, those product costs tend to increase exponentially.

Highly specialized workers can capture some of those downstream exponential product cost increases for themselves. Smaller upstream companies simply cannot compensate these highly specialized workers in the same manner.

CISSP Job Market Economics

For example, a CISSP (Certified Information System Security Professional) is a highly specialized IT professional. These folks are cybersecurity experts. You are very unlikely to ever find a CISSP working at a small to medium-sized organization (SME). You are very likely to find them at almost all big organizations and the consultancies that work for big organizations.

Is it the case that all CISSP workers prefer working at large organizations or at the behest of large organizations? That is very doubtful.

Instead, CISSP workers are disincentivized from working at smaller organizations. They cannot maximize their earning potential at smaller organizations.

While a CISSP worker could find employment at a smaller organization, doing so would require them to work a lot of the time in much less specialized IT areas. Our culture would suggest that this other work would be beneath them, and their earnings would undoubtedly be less than they could be.

What is the social effect of the employment concentration of CISSP workers at large organizations?

The social effects of CISSP workers being concentrated at big organizations are both that large organizations are more secure from cyber threats than smaller organizations and that the cybersecurity profession is more attuned to the cybersecurity needs of large organizations than those of small organizations or families or individuals.

These social effects have profound ramifications. They exacerbate socioeconomic divisions in society. They perpetuate existing disparities–those with the most resources gain while those with the least suffer.

These social effects are not unique to cybersecurity or CISSP workers. These are ubiquitous across the job market.

What would a Christian CISSP consider?

When Christian physicians are confronted by disparities in access to quality healthcare, they often consider their capacity for missional doctoring. They might consider how they might volunteer time at a clinic for the homeless or undertake short-term missions in an impoverished country.

These are awesome timeworn ways for those with capacity to aid those with pernicious needs. Everyone should applaud these efforts and those folks.

What about those who fall between the homeless charity case and the well-insured? Who cares for these folks? Too often, the answer is dictated by the same default economic rules that see the best and the brightest serve the interest of the biggest.

So among the considerations that a Christian CISSP should consider are the value that a smaller company and a smaller community would receive from someone with their level of specialization and expertise willingly foregoing compensation for the opportunity to serve them. Doing so not only benefits these companies and communities, it also holds the possibility for benefiting the CISSP. Working in such places often affords the worker a degree of recognition and autonomy not possible within a big organization, and there can be significant value in that.

Christian economics should at a minimum raise such an issue to consideration, although it all too often fails to even recognize such things.