Professor Donna O'Shea:

One of the leading initiatives we work with regularly is the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative at Virginia Tech. It takes a holistic approach, which involves teaching cybersecurity to secondary school students. We can see the impact of that as they go on to third level. The National Cyber Security Centre in the UK has been working to establish a baseline and ensure the quality of the cybersecurity education it provides. The graduates need to be able to perform a function and role on graduation. The UK National Cyber Security Centre manages that process, with academic institutions submitting documentation to show they have designed their programmes bearing in mind the baseline standard. A very good framework has been established in this regard.

Across the EU, the process is less mature. The European Cybersecurity Skills Framework, ECSF, published by ENISA, identifies 14 job roles, the competencies for which are not yet defined. Within the EU, Ireland is leading on the implementation of a baseline framework through initiatives such as the HCI cyberskills programme run by the HEA, which leverages the ENISA framework. There needs to be an overall authority governing this work, which is currently lacking in Ireland. That is the significant landscape across the globe.