Traditional classroom based training is not going to solve the skills shortage, according to a former director of GCHQ.
Talking to the assembled throngs at the launch of the Digital Cyber Academy, Robert Hannigan said that the industry needs to rethink the way it trains people with traditional approaches failing to deliver the right results as well as turning off the next generation entering the workplace.
Classroom based sessions were not helping to fill the thousands of empty cyber security posts.
“The best guesstimate is that by 2020 there are going to be one and a half million unfilled cyber skills jobs. That is going to get worse as the other half of the planet comes on line and the Internet of Things connects more and more devices spewing out more data”, he said.
“The enabling security that needs to underpin it is going to be even more challenged”, he added.
While the industry and the government knew that they had to “fix the pipeline” and get more people into training and more of those could come from a non-technical background, GCHQ had problems about the way training was offered, Hannigan said.
“A lot of the cyber security training is fairly old fashioned”, he added. “It is classroom based, it is quite static, and it can fairly often be out of date by the time it’s learnt. We must think differently, particularly for a new generation that learn differently,” he said. Gamification was one of the good ways of engaging with them.” Whatever gamifications means.
