Meeting Industrial Demand for Skills in Information Security Education

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Type and Duration

ERASMUS, October 2019 until September 2021

Coordinator

Institute of Information Systems

Main Research

Growth and Complexity

Description

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.

Project Coordinator