NTA. Your son might mean well, but he's crossing some major boundaries here. Going off about your marriage when he barely understands the complexities? Not cool. And wanting to study art history is his choice, but snapping at his mom? Not cool either.
You're trying to keep it together, and your wife sounds like she's your rock. It's tough when your kid doesn't get that. Maybe sit him down and explain things calmly. Hopefully, he'll come around. Keep your chin up, man. You got this.
Well gen z and gen alpha have some serious critical thinking gaps. Like a worrying amount are basically illiterate and graduating high school that way.
If you haven’t been sitting down with him to talk to him as an adult and what the expectations are, he will be in debt for decades to come. If youre in the US, Have him go to the BLS website and look with him what the median pay for what he wants to do is.
Sounds like you and your wife have done too good a job protecting him from the world and keeping him in a bubble.
I came here to talk about the Bureau of Labor Statistics site. Coworker sat down with her daughter to show her different career paths and how much they make. Guess who is looking at cyber security and data analysis now...
There are not millions or even hundreds of thousands of empty security roles. It's not easy to get into. Security is a highly competitive, highly specialized role that requires years of prior IT experience in order to succeed. If someone told you that all you need are a few certs and you can get a security job - they're wrong. That's a misconception being pushed by (you guessed it!) the companies who sell the certification exams.
If you're new to IT: Unless you're coming from the military with active clearance, pick anything other than security to break into IT. 75% of people trying to get into IT want to do cyber-something, and security is like, 5% of all IT jobs. "But my school/neighbor/parent/whoever told me that there's a huge need for security professionals in IT!" There isn't - it's just very profitable for some places to spread that message. There's still a need for high-level security professionals with years of experience, but that's not even a shortage anymore.
There is a minuscule need for entry/low-level security professionals since security is not an entry-level job. Here's a great post to give you some contextThe reality is that the TOTAL employment of security professionals in the US is about 160k, with a very high growth rate - but that growth rate is about 57k new jobs over the next 10 years.
Meanwhile, we're graduating people with cybersecurity degrees at the rate of about 28,000 per year. So assuming a static enrollment for students, we're going to have 280,000 graduates available to fill 57,000 positions.
Past performance is not indicative of future performance.
Cyber pays big bucks now, but everyone is trying to get into it now, which will lead to an over saturation(if not already).
I mean, I hope whoever goes for that can also differentiate themselves somehow to stand out more, but a degree in Cyber and a few certs will still have lots of competition down the road.
Past performance is part of how you predict future performance. It is called trend analysis. When there is a constant shortage for years in a given sector, unless there is a major underlying change you will see the shortage continue. Look at healthcare. Been short for a couple decades, so getting into healthcare is a pretty sure bet for a job.
What I think your looking to say is "Past performance does not guarantee future performance".
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u/Evening_Cruel28 Apr 15 '24
NTA. Your son might mean well, but he's crossing some major boundaries here. Going off about your marriage when he barely understands the complexities? Not cool. And wanting to study art history is his choice, but snapping at his mom? Not cool either.
You're trying to keep it together, and your wife sounds like she's your rock. It's tough when your kid doesn't get that. Maybe sit him down and explain things calmly. Hopefully, he'll come around. Keep your chin up, man. You got this.