The project will identify skill gaps in the information security education and develop recommendations for curricula design in order to minimize such gaps. The project's methodology is based on a novel evidence building technique for characterizing industrial skill demand and academic skill offerings to be deployed in our analysis. We will use automatic tools for collecting job advertisements, extracting key topics from their text and aligning these topics with professional skills. Similarly, we will process academic module descriptions using the topic extraction tools to identify skills conveyed by study programs. By correlating these two types of "skill landscapes", we will identify skill gaps and measure the impact of potential curricula design measures. Based on the outcomes of our evidence-driven study, we will provide recommendations for further curricula development in the information security. We will discuss our findings in a public workshop with key stakeholders in the academic community as well as the respective governance bodies. For the sake of linguistic consistency, our study will be first limited to Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The tools to be deployed and developed in our project will be made available to the academic community so that similar studies could be carried out repeatedly and extended to other fields. Identification of skill gaps in information security education is essential for mitigating the shortage of security specialists in industry. The recommendations to be elaborated in our project will help academic institutions to improve their teaching portfolios and enable governance bodies to effectively steer further development of academic programs.
The skill shortage in the field of information security is of growing concern in industry and society. Security incidents occur on a regular basis and inflict tremendous losses to industry and citizens. Due to the criminal nature of "business models" underlying security incidents, there is a constant arms' race between the attack and defense technologies. Therefore, security can no longer be guaranteed by just developing and deploying appropriate products. Security has become an operational process which require qualified personnel to execute and manage appropriate countermeasures. Thus arises the ever-growing demand for security professionals which currently cannot be met by educational programs. As its main objective, the project addressed two fundamental questions: - Where is the main skill gap between academic offers and industry demands in information security? - What priorities should be set in academic curricula to close this gap as effectively and timely as possible? To address these question in a holistic way, we intended to apply and further develop a novel evidence building methodology based on text mining. The main technical idea of our approach was to collect and automatically analyze a large body of job advertisements related to information security and build models for key topics addressed in these advertisements. Such topics intrinsically represent the skills expected by industry. By performing similar analysis of academic curricula we expected to identify the main skills acquired by students in their studies. Based on the identified mismatches we intended to develop recommendation for future development of curricula in information security.
The lack of qualified specialists is a big problem in the IT industry due to the rapid digitization of modern society. This problem is particularly difficult in the field of information security where the fast development pace is further accelerated by the “arm’s race” between the attack and defense. As a result, the set of skills needed for successful careers in the IT security industry evolves at a rapid pace, which presents challenges for academic institutions responsible for the adequate education of the future workforce. The goal of the project was to develop the methodology for objective analysis of the skill gap in information security and to deploy it for the German speaking countries in Europe. The main idea for the methodology to be developed was to provide a systematic comparison of job ads (as a representation of the skills needed in industry) and academic curricula (as a representation of the skills delivered by academic programs). To avoid the linguistic issues of a strongly multilingual job market and academic environments, the project focus was limited to German speaking countries, and hence the project consortium had one partner for each major German speaking country in Europe (University of Liechtenstein focusing on Switzerland).