Educational Adaptation Required to Close the Cyber-Skills Gap

Addressing the cyber-skills gap requires a variety of career pathways and greater collaboration between governments, academia and industry, according to experts speaking during a webinar entitled Closing The Cyber Skills Gap: Can We Make a Difference? This session involved security vendor Palo Alto Networks and academics, government members and security experts from Scotland, and took place during CyberScotland week.

First and foremost, a strong cybersecurity awareness and culture throughout society needs to be built. This includes making cybersecurity exciting and interesting to children even at primary school age, teaching them basic behaviors to stay safe using digital technology, and later on, engraining it into non-technical subjects at college. Anna Chung, threat intelligence analyst, Palo Alto Networks, who came into cybersecurity from a non-technical background herself, explained: “The best way is to teach the younger generations how to protect themselves, because cybersecurity is not just a profession or a career, it is a basic fundamental element of our current digital way of life.”

Callum Campbell, lecturer, Organization Glasgow Clyde College, said: “We have to start influencing children into the ideas and concepts of security,” adding that “it’s something that society as a whole has to make a paradigm shift on.”

Teaching children the importance of problem solving is particularly critical for developing the soft skills that are needed to pursue a later career in the area of cybersecurity, according to the speakers.

Denise Doyle, lecturer, City of Glasgow College, observed that one positive of the current COVID-19 crisis is that is has forced people to be more self-reliant. She noted that often “the basic problem solving skills ar ..

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