SCOPES: Scalable Cyber Operations Educational Strategies

The cybersecurity domain, particularly within the Department of Defense (DOD), is at a pivotal juncture. Despite the DOD's concerted efforts to enhance recruitment and hiring through various programs and policies, top IT officials, including Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, CIO of the Joint Staff, have raised alarms about the widening cyber skills gap. The crux of the problem lies in the current training and education methodologies in cybersecurity. Effective training must be: 1) scalable, addressing the vast skills gap, 2) in-depth, ensuring a thorough understanding of system security, and 3) responsive to rapidly evolving threats. However, current approaches often do not leverage researched and validated learning strategies that are specifically designed to support task competency-based learning. There is a pressing need to realize greater efficiency and efficacy in the education of skilled cybersecurity professionals. The opportunity here extends beyond just the creation of new curricula. The hundreds of education and training providers across the U.S. will not adopt a uniform common curriculum of content, nor a single platform for content delivery. An opportunity thus exists to provide recommended instructional design strategies that align completely with existing skill, competency, and work role standards. Curriculum, content, and activities can then be designed according to these standardized strategies. However, the value to the industry and educational institutions will likely not be in reusing this content, but in leveraging the strategies to dramatically improve the design of their own content.Ā In this proposal, we will outline the development of a uniform method to map workforce needs to specific learning strategies that will, in turn, drive curriculum development and rapid evaluation. While the overarching goal of this work is to establish a uniform and repeatable method for identifying and remediating skill gaps across the cybersecurity workforce, our Phase I technical objectives will focus more narrowly on gaps identified in a particular segment within the cybersecurity workforce. Our Phase I work will serve as a constructive example of the more general method. Ultimately, we aim to establish a repeatable method that will unlock efficiency by shifting the focus from the product-oriented goal of building better content to a focus on the process-oriented goal of understanding how we can better build that content.