AI tools are helping bad guys automate bigger, faster, more sophisticated attacks. FBI data show cybercrime losses in the U.S. surged by more than 25% last year. AI itself is also being used to defend systems, but many organizations have chronically underinvested in security. And industry groups have long pointed to a gaping shortage of people with the skills to fend off hackers and phishers. Now, a lot of job-seekers trying to break into the field are hitting a firewall.Megan Osteen is one of them. She’s wanted to work in tech pretty much forever.“My dad was a software engineer, and I just remember, a lot of my childhood, I would sit in his office with him, and he would explain to me what he was doing, like how it worked,” she said.Life sort of got in the way of her plans. She left college when she became a mom and grabbed the work she could, most recently as a behavioral therapist for kids with autism. When her dad died a few years ago, she decided it was time to make a career leap. She kept hearing cybersecurity was the way to go, “because of the projected job growth and the demand within the field. It seemed promising.”She took online courses and, in February, earned her first cybersecurity certification. She’s been looking for jobs, but not finding many opportunities.“I'm trying to find ways to keep pushing forward and not get stuck in the mud,” she said. “But it has been truly just very, very difficult. I just feel like it was false advertisement.”Cybersecurity jobs have been the focus of a decades-long workforce development push: “Learn to Code,” but with the urgency of a national security imperative. It spawned a cottage industry of federal and state programs, for-profit bootcamps, certifications, and online career coaches like Evan Lutz.“The thing that initially gave me rise on social media is that I can speak very quickly with concise ideas,” he said.Lutz quit his job teaching high school math in 2019 to launch a career in cybersecurity. He said it took him about five months to roughly double his income, and he’s built a following advising others on his roadmap for success. But that roadmap has changed a lot since he started posting about it in the early 2020s. “You could literally have your Security+ certification in a month or two, and no experience and get a job making $60,000 a year,” he saidDemand seemed insatiable; interest rates were near zero, tech was booming, and workers were in short supply coming out of the pandemic. But workers weren’t the only ones who got the message, according to management professor Joseph Fuller at Harvard Business School.“If you are an innovative company, you're looking out there and saying, ‘You know, what's worth a lot of money? Tools that mean companies don't have to hire so many cyber techs because they're hard to get and they're expensive,’” he said.AI is increasingly taking over the routine tasks that junior workers once handled, like monitoring systems for anomalies and deciding which ones to prioritize for response. “And you're going to see that again and again and again,” said Fuller, anywhere the labor market is signaling high demand.It makes it nearly impossible for workers to plan for a secure future, said Lisa Countryman-Quiroz, CEO of JVS, a job training non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area.“There's almost a generation of people for whom the rug has been pulled out from under them,” she said.When entry-level IT jobs started drying up, JVS pivoted to cybersecurity training last year. But Countryman-Quiroz said employers seem to be hiring for senior roles — people with the experience to be the boss of AI. The market is tough for people starting out, and she’s not sure if they’ll continue the program.“We are focused on moving people from poverty to the middle class,” said Countryman-Quiroz. “And there have been, for decades really, a declining number of opportunities that allow you to do that.”Job-seeker Megan Osteen said she might have to go back to her old job in behavioral therapy while she plans her next steps.“There's a lot of weight on it — financial weight, especially because I am a single mom and I did pause my career, pause everything, in order to pursue this,” she said. “I want to, you know, prove that I can do it too, like my dad.”In the meantime, she’s putting her skills to practical use. She used AI to build a system that flags job scam phishing messages, which she’s been getting a lot of during her search.