Experts in the cybersecurity landscape point out that the education system is detached from the realities of cybersecurity. The observation is strengthened by the finding of a survey that revealed that one in two cybersecurity professionals were not able to confirm the usefulness of their academic training when it came to their current roles.
The study commissioned by Kaspersky and conducted by InfoSec found that 14% of the professionals found their formal education to be somewhat useful, 13% found it to be slightly useful and 24% said their education was of no use at all.
The regional picture varies with respect to the way respondents perceive the quality of the formal training they’ve received. The META(Middle East, Turkey and Africa) region turned out to have the poorest quality of cybersecurity education as judged by respondents, as it scores less than 3 points on all assessment criteria, while LATAM has the highest rated cybersecurity learning schemes, scoring more than 3.7 points on average.
While one issue is the quality and relevance of educational programs, another is the availability of cybersecurity and InfoSec training. For instance, half of current cybersecurity experts believe that the availability of cybersecurity or information security courses in formal higher education is either ‘poor,’ or ‘very poor.’ Among professionals with 2-5-years of experience, this figure soars to more than 80%.
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Additionally, less than half of respondents said their college or university program offered them hands-on experience in real-life cybersecurity scenarios as live projects: 23%‘strongly agreed’ with this statement, and 26 percent ‘somewhat agreed.’
In addition, access to the latest technologies and equipment, and the quality of internships emerged as the weakest aspects of cybersecurity education for most regions.
“Cybersecurity education is facing certain challenges when it comes to keeping up with developments in the cybersecurity industry,” Evgeniya Russkikh, Head of Cybersecurity Education at Kaspersky said.
The world of cybersecurity has been witnessing a shortfall in talent and the existing cybersecurity workforce needs to grow almost two-fold to run at full capacity and support the global economy, ISC2, one of the world’s leading organization for cybersecurity professionals, said.
The research was conducted with 1,012 InfoSec professionals in 29 countries, from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the META region, plus North and Latin America.
