First REWIRE online event on Cybersecurity Skills Gap & Education
On September 19, 2022, REWIRE held it first online event on Cybersecurity Skills Gap & Education. EfVET is a partner of the REWIRE Cybersecurity Skills Alliance – A New Vision for Europe project and, EfVET Project and Membership Assistant, Ainhoa Segurola Uli, had the opportunity to participate in the event and present the REWIRE Fiche I and REWIRE Policy Recommendation I.
Ainhoa Segurola started her intervention by describing the objective of the REWIRE Fiches, that is to underpin and illustrate the REWIRE strategy by identifying, documenting, and promoting concrete best and good practices at national and regional level, all aiming at addressing the skills shortages and mismatches between cybersecurity education and the industry requirements, as well as fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships. Then, she briefly explained the methodology followed to develop the first of the Fiches, focused on categorising the initiatives selected, and highlighted that the REWIRE consortium is working on a comprehensive analysis of the initiatives collected in the lifetime of the project.
The second part of the intervention referred to the second of the project results presented during the event, that is, the first Policy Brief, focused on the cybersecurity skills gap and shortage, as Ainhoa explained.
The presentation of the REWIRE Fiche I and Policy Recommendation I continued with the intervention of Argyro Chatzopoulou from ApiroPlus Solutions, who talked about some of the initial conclusions reached. For example, she pointed out that among the different countries’ cybersecurity strategies analysed, all of them include at least one milestone or objective related to cybersecurity education, awareness and training. However, there is a scarcity of public information regarding the performance of the actions implemented by the different countries, which makes it difficult to have all the information needed, at least considering the objective is to identify best practices, and not just initiatives.
Finally, regarding the Policy Brief, Argyro Chatzopoulou briefly explained the results of analysing the different existing Cybersecurity Skills Frameworks in other countries (Australia, Singapore, USA, Canada, UK and The Netherlands) and the comparison between them. For this purpose, Argyro explained which aspects were considered when doing the analysis, such as the role profiles, career paths, structure, levels of maturity (for the role profiles) and the possible focus on SMEs.
The event held afterwards a moderated discussion between Prof Nineta Polemi (University of Piraeus-UNIPI & Co-Founder/CTO of trustilio), Prof Christos Douligeris (University of Piraeus), and Ioannis Agrafiotis, Network Security Officer at the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA).
