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Bridging Cybersecurity Education and Industry Demands: Mapping and Prioritizing Curriculum Guidelines | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Bridging Cybersecurity Education and Industry Demands: Mapping and Prioritizing Curriculum Guidelines


Abstract:

Curricula must align with industry-required competencies to produce an industry-ready workforce and effectively address cybersecurity challenges. However, current curricu...Show More

Abstract:

Curricula must align with industry-required competencies to produce an industry-ready workforce and effectively address cybersecurity challenges. However, current curricula do not meet the evolving needs of the workforce, resulting in a significant skills gap. This paper aims to reduce the gap by identifying and prioritising Knowledge Areas (KA) according to industry requirements described by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), producing an industry-ready workforce. This paper proposes a novel approach by integrating Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the cosine similarity measure to tackle this challenge. This study utilizes BERT to tokenize and vectorize the learning outcomes of KA defined by the Joint Task Force on Cybersecurity Curriculum (JTF) and the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSA) statements of each specialty area defined in NICE. Implementing cosine similarity analysis identifies the similarity between the curricula guidelines vector and the industry demand vectors. The results present the similarity between the KA and required KSAs. The highest similarity observed is 92.9% between the specialty area ‘Knowledge Management’ and the KA ‘Human Security.’ The lowest similarity is 84.2% between the specialty area ‘Network Security’ and the KA ‘Software Security’. By aligning the KA with the required KSAs, this study contributes to producing an industry-ready cybersecurity workforce. By implementing these findings, this study contributes to developing an industry-ready workforce by prioritizing KAs according to the required KSAs of each specialty area, thereby addressing critical gaps in cybersecurity education.
Date of Conference: 07-08 August 2024
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 30 September 2024
ISBN Information:
Conference Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Funding Agency:


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