Meeting Industrial Demand for Skills in Information Security Education. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Meeting Industrial Demand for Skills in Information Security Education.

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The project will identify skill gaps in the information security education and develop recommendations for curricula design in order to minimize such gaps. The project’s methodology is based on a novel evidence building technique for characterizing industrial skill demand and academic skill offerings to be deployed in our analysis. We will use automatic tools for collecting job advertisements, extracting key topics from their text and aligning these topics with professional skills. Similarly, we will process academic module descriptions using the topic extraction tools to identify skills conveyed by study programs. By correlating these two types of “skill landscapes”, we will identify skill gaps and measure the impact of potential curricula design measures. Based on the outcomes of our evidence-driven study, we will provide recommendations for further curricula development in the information security. We will discuss our findings in a public workshop with key stakeholders in the academic community as well as the respective governance bodies.

For the sake of linguistic consistency, our study will be first limited to Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The tools to be deployed and developed in our project will be made available to the academic community so that similar studies could be carried out repeatedly and extended to other fields.

Identification of skill gaps in information security education is essential for mitigating the shortage of security specialists in industry. The recommendations to be elaborated in our project will help academic institutions to improve their teaching portfolios and enable governance bodies to effectively steer further development of academic programs.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 201709 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAT LIECHTENSTEIN & Country: LI

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITAET INNSBRUCK
• JULIUS-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAT WURZBURG