SpartaNews

SPARTA is working towards a better cybersecurity education

30th Sep 2020

Cybersecurity education is an important and pertinent topic as it plays a major role in mitigating the risks caused by a global shortage of cybersecurity experts. SPARTA team worked in several directions to solve the absence of a comprehensive methodology for program design, decrease the need of cybersecurity study programs, and increase the public awareness regarding procedures and tools for the protection of ICT systems.

First, the development of SPARTA Cybersecurity Skills Framework supports the identification of skills necessary for professionals in cybersecurity, and therefore creates the necessary link between education, training and industry. With this common vocabulary, SPARTA was able to analyze existing study programs and visualize the results in a dynamic web application.

In particular, the SPARTA Cybersecurity Higher Education Map contains the list of universities and their study programs, and provides users with the functionality for viewing, filtering using specific criteria, and discovering cybersecurity programs. The map currently displays 116 curricula and further data collection is ongoing.

Moreover, SPARTA WP9 produced a SPARTA Cybersecurity Curricula Designer which is a dynamic tool allowing any university to generate a cybersecurity (bachelor and master) curriculum from scratch or based on an existing good-practice curriculum. The designer is still in Beta version and will be made available soon.