Professionalizing the Nation's Cybersecurity Workforce? Criteria for Decision Making

Professionalizing the Nation's Cybersecurity Workforce? Criteria for Decision-Making considers approaches to increasing the professionalization of the nation's cybersecurity workforce. This report examines workforce requirements for cybersecurity and the segments and job functions in which professionalization is most needed; the role of assessment tools, certification, licensing, and other means for assessing and enhancing professionalization; and emerging approaches, such as performance-based measures. It also examines requirements for the federal (military and civilian) workforce, the private sector, and state and local government. The report focuses on three essential elements: (1) understanding the context for cybersecurity workforce development, (2) considering the relative advantages, disadvantages, and approaches to professionalizing the nation's cybersecurity workforce, and (3) setting forth criteria that can be used to identify which, if any, specialty areas may require professionalization and set forth criteria for evaluating different approaches and tools for professionalization. Professionalizing the Nation's Cybersecurity Workforce? Criteria for Decision-Making characterizes the current landscape for cybersecurity workforce development and sets forth criteria that the federal agencies participating in the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education - as well as organizations that employ cybersecurity workers - could use to identify which specialty areas may require professionalization and to evaluate different approaches and tools for professionalization.

Seymour (Sy) E. Goodman is professor of International Affairs and Computing at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. He also serves as Co-Director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy and Co-Director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.

Professor Goodman studies international developments in information technologies and related public policy issues. In this capacity, he has over 200 publications and served on many academic, government, and industry advisory, study, and editorial committees. He has been the International Perspectives editor for the Communications of the ACM for the last nineteen years, and has studied computing on all seven continents in about one hundred countries. He recently served as Chair of the Committee on Improving Cybersecurity Research in the United States, National Research Council, and as a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies of Science and Engineering.

• Information Security and Critical Infrastructure Protection

• Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy
• Sam Nunn School of International Affairs