Achieving Critical Infrastructure sector focused cyber security workforce development profiles

Ollie Gagnon, Chief Strategic Advisor, Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience at Idaho National Laboratory.

Most believe that cyber security’s major problem is technical. However, human error most often causes the need for cyber security to protect systems.

This means people are the biggest cyber security vulnerability. In workforce development, the biggest gap is determining an organization’s cyber security needs, optimal structure and a continuing education process necessary to develop and maintain a cyber-ready workforce. This can be achieved through development of critical infrastructure sector focused cyber workforce profiles.

Understanding the needs or organizations, agencies, corporations, and businesses requires three main elements.

First, a workforce development framework that provides cyber security skills in alignment with the organization and its standard of practice. The Cyber Competency Health and Maturity Progression Model (Cyber-CHAMP) is one potential capability to address this need. Cyber-CHAMP can help organizations understand what they don’t know and direct their cyber security resources. The Cyber-CHAMP framework is a process that an organization can use to discover and establish a security target and training plan.

The framework is divided into four modules that look at an organization’s strategic alignment, security culture and workforce competencies. Second, a cyber security career-focused capability, aligned to nationally recognized cyber security workforce framework.  This is where available capabilities such as Cyber Knights can help address the need.

Cyber Knights is a cyber security talent assessment, development and retention system that is at the crossroads of Educators, Employers, and Talent. Cyber Knights appeals to anyone currently within the cyber security field and is meant to serve an individual or organization over the life of the career. Finally, each entity needs to understand their cyber security posture as a risk informing mechanism driving workforce development across the structure. Cyber Florida’s tailored Cyber security Evaluation Tool (CSET) instance provides a method to systematically compare and monitor security improvements in cyber systems.

 Cyber Florida CSET also identifies cyber security strengths and deficiencies based on industry standards and derives security enhancement recommendations from database of cyber security standards, guidelines, practices, and associated actions.

Critical Infrastructure