WASHINGTON – Want a career with zero chances of going jobless?

Try the booming field of cybersecurity. Companies can't hire fast enough. In the United States, companies report 209,000 cybersecurity jobs that are in need of filling.

It'll only get worse. By 2019, according to the Cybersecurity Jobs Report, the workforce shortfall may reach 1.5 million. Globally, the shortage could hit 6 million, it added.

"The internet is growing faster than the growth of people to protect it," said Michael Kaiser, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Alliance.

It is a problem with the full attention of the White House, which in July called for "immediate and broad-sweeping actions to address the growing workforce shortage and establish a pipeline of well-qualified cybersecurity talent."

A dramatic rise in cybercrime has put government in competition with private companies for hiring cybersecurity experts. Private companies recoil at the possibility of hackers stealing their proprietary information, holding their data for ransom or plundering their servers of the personal information of clients.

The shortage in job candidates is not an easy or quick problem to address, experts said.

"It takes a long time to develop the instincts to be an effective cybersecurity engineer. You can't just come out of college and know what to do," said David Foote, a tech industry researcher and co-founder of Foote Partners of Vero Beach, Fla. "The threat landscape changes all the time, and that's hard to train for," Kaiser added.

Efforts to poach cybersecurity experts occur at a blistering pace.

About 46 percent of working cybersecurity professionals said they received solicitations for other jobs "at least once per week," according to a survey released last month jointly by the Enterprise Strategy Group and Information Systems Security Association.

"Turnover in the cybersecurity ranks could represent an existential risk to organizations in lower-paying industries like academia, health care, the public sector and retail," the survey said.

In the federal government's push to expand cybersecurity training, it has targeted all levels of education, including $125 million in National Science Foundation grants to primary and secondary schools. It has also designated nearly 200 colleges and universities as National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense.

Many universities are gearing up programs to meet the surge in demand. But luring younger students into cybersecurity can be a tough sell.

Cybersecurity has little of the cachet of other areas of information technology, such as machine learning, and cybersecurity experts aren't even always loved at their own companies.

"They have to have that nonconformist edge where they can pick apart a problem. That kind of personality pushes some people's buttons," said Katrina Timlin, of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

In the most recent quarter, Foote said, the firm found an average salary of $99,000 for a cyber security specialist with three years' experience.