An analysis framework of portable and measurable higher education for future cybersecurity workforce development

Abstract

An educated workforce is essential to government and industry, hence the need to provide a high-quality workforce has been crucial in higher education academic program development. In the cybersecurity field, the situation is not quite satisfactory, the reason comes down to the fact that this new industry is lacking a portable and measurable framework to evaluate the efficacy of the academic programs, thus, to provide the industry with the unified high-quality workforce. In this paper, we aim to come up with a design of an analytical framework for portable and measurable academic programs for future workforce development.The ultimate purpose for our research is to develop cybersecurity workforce through the increase of the number of cybersecurity professionals with a 4-year degree, in this project we will develop a seamless pathway for students transferring from 2-year programs such as Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana(Ivy Tech) Cybersecurity AAS program to a 4-year program such as Purdue University Northwest(PNW) CIT program.