The implications of the Executive Order on America’s Cybersecurity Workforce and what it means for cyber workforce development going forward.
The White House issued the Executive Order on America’s Cybersecurity Workforce. This forward-looking executive order aims to close the cybersecurity skills gap and increase the number of cybersecurity professionals working in the field. This is a huge need for our critical infrastructure, national defense and modern economy. We are bound to see some changes across the industry with the passing of this bill. Although we don’t have a crystal ball to see the future, there are some implications we anticipate for the cybersecurity industry overall.
Improved Global Security from Nationally Recognized Standards
The executive order encourages widespread adoption of the cybersecurity workforce framework created by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE). The use of the NICE framework will create some national standards in the industry and allow for more qualifying leverage. This will provide evaluation requirements used in contracts for IT and cybersecurity services.
Prioritizing Cyber Workforce Diversity
According to Cybersecurity Ventures, there will be up to 3.5 million job openings by 2021 and currently, females represent less than 12% of the global cybersecurity workforce. This stat is crazy! To keep pace with sophisticated adversaries and develop technology that supports human cyber operator decision making, diversity of thinking and skill and approach should be a hyper-focus for the security industry. Women are well suited for, and extremely talented at, technical fields such as information security, security engineering, and AI engineering; however, recruiting and retaining women in these fields is not where it needs to be. There is a long-standing stereotype that cybersecurity is too technical for women and that’s not the case. There are many critical skills that women bring to the table including an incredible attention to detail, problem-solving, and communication skills that are as important in cyber work as the technical know-how. Groups like Cyber Patriot, Girls Who Code, and more recently Women’s Cyberjutsu are wonderful organizations that inspire young girls and women to pursue careers in cyber and technology.
The aptitude for cybersecurity lies not only in the technical fields, but can also be found in many unexpected disciplines. Some of the best cyber defenders started their career out doing something completely different. We need this type of diversity and people with different backgrounds to join the industry. We need to improve thinking and skill, both technical and critical thinking skills to combat today’s adversaries.
New Methods of Cybersecurity Training
In developing the workforce, we need to be cognizant of the need for new methods of training that inspire the next-gen learner. The traditional ways of learning in a classroom have worked in the past, but there are a lot of statistics that show traditional classroom settings alone aren’t the most effective in terms of applied skill preparedness and learning retention. Studies on the effectiveness of traditional classroom settings show that students lose 40% of what they’ve learned after 20 minutes and between 50 – 80% of what they’ve learned after one day, and 90% of what they’ve learned after six days.
Gamified learning approaches are currently being adopted federal agencies, banks, oil and gas and other infrastructure organizations as well as academic institutions such as the University of Colorado, Divergence Academy , and Loudoun Public Schools. This form of active learning generally includes on-keyboard activities along with team collaboration and applying concepts to real-world scenarios, which has shown to improve retention to 75% compared to 5% through more passive learning methods like lectures with PowerPoints. Recently, a graduate student at the University of Colorado shared his experience after he played one of the cyber games in Project Ares, Circadence’s flagship learning platform. He mentioned that he liked the feeling the game created of a sense of impending danger from the robots and that made him think better and learn more as he worked to defeat them
Pursuing ‘Cyber as a Sport’ to Capture Talent
We embrace the idea of “cyber as a sport” believing cybersecurity skill building can and should be fun, like sports. Cyber competitions are a great way to encourage skill-building plus they bring attention to the industry. These kinds of competitions should be happening from early school age (Girls Who Code), through high school (Cyber Patriot), and university (NCCDC), and then throughout the professional career. Competition categories can include individual and team-based events, software reverse engineering and exploitation, network operations, forensics, big data analysis, cyber analysis, cyber defense, cyber exploitation, secure programming, obfuscated coding and more.
Wicked6 Cyber Games , cyberBUFFS, SoCal Cyber Cup, and Paranoia Challenge are several examples of events where students can engage in healthy competition and skill-building among peers in an active, living lab setting. Circadence ’s gamified training platform, Project Ares is used as the platform to deliver the competitive exercises though its immersive, gamified cyber range. Realistic scenarios challenge players in mission-specific virtual environments using real-world tools, network activity and a large library of authentic threat scenarios.
Without continued effort to increase the cybersecurity workforce, our critical infrastructure, national defense and modern economy will be jeopardized.
The publication of this Executive Order is an indication that government is ready to proactively address our very serious cybersecurity challenges and is looking to new ways of training and skill building to meet the demands of today’s workforce.
To keep organizations better protected in the wake of digital transformation, legislative progress like this is a significant stepping stone to alleviating the industry’s largest challenges.
Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash
Photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash
