Cybersecurity professionals continue to face job security and demand for their services by the federal government, who can’t find enough of them. The recent 2012 Career Impact Survey by ISC2, found federal cybersecurity professionals experienced stable employment, career advancement opportunities and salary increases in 2011. The survey of 545 federal cybersecurity pros found that 97 percent are currently employed and only 8 percent were unemployed at any point in 2011. Pay raises are abundant too, with 62 percent receiving a salary increase in 2011 and 48 percent expecting one in 2012. Eleven percent of respondents said they received salary increases of 10 percent or higher last year. The top cybersecurity skills federal hiring managers are looking for are certification and accreditation (68 percent), operations security (55 percent) and telecommunications and network security (53 percent), the survey found. An ongoing trend is the difficulty to find qualified candidates to fill federal cybersecurity jobs, who often need high level government clearances. Eighty-three percent of federal hiring managers said it was extremely difficult to find and hire qualified candidates. "Information security professionals with the right mix of knowledge and experience remain in high demand by government hiring managers, but qualified candidates are hard to come by as agencies try to build their security teams," said W. Hord Tipton, executive director of (ISC)². And the best way to land the cybersecurity pros found their job was referrals from colleagues (50 percent), online job websites (33 percent) and networking (10 percent), according to the respondents.