REWIRE Fiches

The REWIRE Fiches aim to underpin and illustrate the REWIRE strategy by identifying, documenting, and promoting concrete best and good practices at national and regional level with the objective of addressing skills shortages and mismatches as well as fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships in the field of cybersecurity. The REWIRE Fiches will be made up of a series of fiches presented every six months. To carry out the REWIRE Fiches and achieve its objective, a wide range of initiatives have been identified. All the collected initiatives will be analysed in a deeper level and, as a result, different good practices will be shared.

The second publication of the REWIRE Fiches focuses on the current framework of the cybersecurity skills gap and shortage challenges at European level. After a description of the existing frameworks and various policy initiatives to address the cybersecurity skills gap and shortage, the REWIRE Fiche II showcases a total of five best practices addressing the challenge. Most of the examples presented aim at raising awareness among citizens, which reinforces the idea that also the initiatives collected by the REWIRE partners were mostly categorised within the Awareness Raising section. A more comprehensive analysis is being conducted by the REWIRE project to map best practices at national and regional levels.

The Policy Recommendations will be composed of different Policy Briefs presented every six months. Each of these Policy Briefs will aim at conveying the implications of project outputs for policy and practice. The content of the different Policy Briefs will cover the main areas that need to be addressed in the future, such as the European Cybersecurity Skills Framework, the lack of cooperation among stakeholders or the lack of awareness of cybersecurity risks. The purpose will be to implement the solutions of the European Cybersecurity Blueprint proposed through WP3 by facilitating its implementation and making policy recommendations on the different topics to be dealt with.

Not only there is an evident cybersecurity skills gap and shortage, but cybersecurity education is lagging the ability to attract more students and to produce graduates with the required cybersecurity knowledge and skills, despite the efforts made by the European institutions to increase interest in the field. The second Policy Brief aims to improve the attractiveness of cybersecurity as a career by presenting one of the strategic priorities within the REWIRE Cybersecurity Strategy, that is the rebranding and promoting of cybersecurity. Moreover, a brief description of the different misconceptions of cybersecurity as a career option are presented, and the Policy Recommendation II includes a series of policy options as well to address this challenge.

FOR “READ THE DOCUMENT”