At AfroTech’s 10th annual conference in Houston last week, Morgan DeBaun took on the question many mid-career professionals are asking privately: if AI is coming for jobs, where should people go next? Her answer matched the one she gave on the Earn Your Leisure podcast two weeks earlier. Go where the defense is.DeBaun, the founder and CEO of Blavity and CEO of AfroTech, sat down with the show’s hosts for a live recording on Nov. 5. She described a near future in which AI agents log into our bank accounts, make trades and negotiate with other agents on our behalf, and she pointed out that much of the financial system still runs on old code that will need securing. “The bad people also have the same intelligence,” she told the room, adding that they may soon have more computing power than the average person. Her conclusion for the audience was direct. Anyone who understands cybersecurity, risk, governance and compliance is “going to have a job for the next 30, 40 years.”The Defense DividendMost AI career advice tells workers to learn the tools. DeBaun’s argument is that the more durable position belongs to the people who protect them. Call it the defense dividend: the premium that accrues to workers who secure the systems AI makes more powerful.AdvertisementAdvertisementOn the Earn Your Leisure episode released Oct. 22, the hosts asked where people should be focusing that they are not. “Cyber security 10 times over,” she said. If AI is taking over, she asked, who defends against it? Her answer was the engineers, analysts and infrastructure builders fighting bad actors, and she said those workers have real job security ahead.The labor data supports her. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of information security analysts to grow 21% from 2025 to 2035, compared with 3% for all occupations, and puts the median pay at $129,180. Employers sought more than 514,000 cybersecurity workers over a 12-month span tracked by CyberSeek, a 12% jump from the year before. AI is widening the gap rather than closing it. In the 2025 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study of more than 16,000 security professionals, 59% reported critical or significant skills needs, up from 44% a year earlier, and AI topped the list of skills their teams lack.A Pivot Without A Second DegreeThis is the part millennials should hear. DeBaun said on the podcast that cybersecurity does not require a college degree. Workers can stack certifications, she said, and become qualified for roles at large companies that pay multiple six figures. The BLS notes that while a bachelor’s degree is typical, some analysts enter with a high school diploma plus training and certifications. For a 35-year-old still paying down student loans, that is the difference between a pivot and a restart.Her broader degree advice in the same episode drew attention online. She backed electrical engineering, cybersecurity and risk, along with math, economics and computer science at schools that understand AI. She said she would skip a business undergrad right now because colleges are not keeping pace, and she put law on her no list because AI is absorbing contract work and pulling the average salary down. (She later revisited one of her answers, on African American studies, after a friend challenged her.) Most millennials are long past choosing a major, but the logic carries over. Skills that manage risk inside AI systems are gaining value, and skills built on routine document work are losing it.Your Résumé Is The Entry PointListen to the words DeBaun used onstage: risk, governance, compliance. Those are not only coding jobs. A millennial in banking, healthcare administration, legal operations, HR or project management already knows how their industry handles sensitive data and regulation, and governance roles reward that context.AdvertisementAdvertisementShe also told the podcast audience to take the entry-level job first. “I like learning on other people’s dime,” she said, arguing that understanding how large organizations operate pays off even for people who eventually leave to build their own companies. For career changers, that can mean an internal move into a security, risk or audit team before an external leap.Who Gets To DefendThe advice carries extra weight at AfroTech, which DeBaun says has drawn more than 500,000 people into its community over a decade. A 2021 Aspen Policy Academy poll found that just 9% of cybersecurity experts were Black. A field with a talent shortage and a representation gap is one where newcomers have bargaining power.If you want to collect the defense dividend, start with three moves this quarter. List every part of your current job that touches risk, data privacy or compliance. Choose one entry-level security certification and set a date to sit for it. Then ask your company’s security team what problems keep them up at night. DeBaun expects the work to last decades, and the people who start learning now will be the ones doing it.This article was originally published on Forbes.com
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