💡 Why it matters: AI tools can be tricked into leaking private data, ignoring rules or giving harmful answers. Specialists who test and defend these systems help make AI safe enough to trust.
🌍 Around the world
- United States: Jobs for information security analysts are projected to grow 21% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average (US Bureau of Labor Statistics).
💰 What it can pay
🇳🇬 Nigeria
- Starting out
- ₦1.5M – ₦4M
- Mid-career
- ₦5M – ₦14M
- Senior
- ₦14M – ₦35M
≈ ₦417k – ₦1.2M a month mid-career. Indicative estimate by Incusim.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Closest National Careers Service profile: IT security co-ordinator. Typical starter to experienced salary. National Careers Service, 2026
🇺🇸 United States
Closest US category: Information security analysts. Median pay; low and high are the 10th and 90th percentiles.. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025
🇨🇦 Canada
Closest Job Bank occupation: Cybersecurity analyst. Hourly wage low/high x 2,080 hours (no national median shown). Job Bank (Government of Canada), 2023-2024
Yearly pay before tax. UK, US and Canada figures come from the official sources named on each card. Nigeria has no official salary survey, so those are our indicative estimates. Real pay depends on the employer, the place, your skills and experience.
🛠️ What you actually do
- Test AI chatbots and tools with tricky inputs to see if they can be fooled, called AI red teaming
- Look for ways attackers could steal data, change a model's behaviour or poison the data it learns from
- Record each weakness, rate how serious it is and explain how to fix it
- Help teams add protections such as filters, access limits and monitoring
- Retest after fixes, and keep up with new kinds of attack, since the field changes fast
⚡ Skills you'll need
- Curiosity and creative thinking
- Programming
- Security basics (networks and systems)
- Critical thinking
- Report writing
Get ready at school
🇳🇬 Nigeria
- Legal practice labs and online courses in security and machine learning
- Entry roles in IT support or security, then specialising in AI
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
- Cyber security technologist apprenticeship
- Starting in IT support or a security operations centre role, then specialising in AI
🇺🇸 United States
- Starting in IT help desk or a security operations role
- Legal practice labs and bug bounty programs, then specialising in AI
🇨🇦 Canada
- College cybersecurity diploma plus certifications
- Starting in IT support or a security operations role, then specialising in AI
🗺️ Your path to this career
- 1Learn programming and how networks work, and practise only on legal training sites
- 2Study computer science or cybersecurity, or build skills through online labs
- 3Learn how AI models work and how they can fail
- 4Start in IT support, a security operations centre or a junior security role, and join legal bug bounty programmes
- 5Move into AI security testing, then lead a team or specialise
⏰ A day in the life
A company is about to launch a customer chatbot. With written permission, you try to trick it into revealing hidden instructions and another customer's details. You find one trick that works, write clear steps to reproduce it and help the developers add a fix before launch.