Developing a Competency Framework for Building Cybersecurity Professionals

The provision of secure networks and services is becoming more critical with the continuing growth of online services and prevalent hacks against systems. In particular, at the national level, countries must protect their critical infrastructure from malicious attacks. Central to this is the requirement to have an adequate pool of industry professionals who are well-versed in cybersecurity. These skillsets must be built and maintained in a structured manner and have a roadmap of lifelong learning for sustainability. A wide range of cybersecurity certification schemes are available; however, many are either prohibitively expensive to build large pools of professionals or have assessment mechanisms that do not measure individual abilities practically. This paper presents an approach to define a structured framework for building core critical skills in cybersecurity that is in line with industry requirements, provides a lifelong learning roadmap, incorporates professionalism and has a practical, competency-based assessment mechanism.