What is it about?
Why is it so hard to find qualified experts in cybersecurity? What are the skills that the industry expects in this field? Are these skills delivered by academic programs in cybersecurity? The study presented in this paper gives intriguing insights into the discrepancy between academic "supply" and industrial expectations for cybersecurity jobs. Our methods and tools can be used for similar investigations in other fields and are available as open source software.
Featured Image
Photo by Modestas Urbonas on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our study and tools provide a sound data-driven methodology for measuring industrial demand for skills and assessing the impact of educational programs. It can be periodically repeated with relatively little effort in order to continuously monitor skill gaps in specific fields.
Perspectives
The findings were quite a surprise of the entire team. We all teach cybersecurity courses at different universities and have always believed cryptography to be a cornerstone of security education. The study told us a different story. What seems to matter most in security industry are skills related to software, networks and systems. Furthermore, many skills that have been identified by our tools are not even part of established skill taxonomies. This shows how fast the professional ecosystem is evolving in cybersecurity.
Pavel Laskov
University of Liechtenstein
Writing this article was a great pleasure as it has co-authors with whom I have had the chance to do an Erasmus Plus project. This article also lead to a good methodology to continuously assess and address a skill gap.
François Goupil
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Towards Understanding the Skill Gap in Cybersecurity, July 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3502718.3524807.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
