DCMS report focuses on the UK’s cyber recruitment pool
On 23 March 2021, the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a new report “Understanding the Cyber Security Recruitment Pool”, detailing the outcomes of a research project whose aim was to “quantify and provide understanding of the cyber skills recruitment pool in the UK”.
The 73-page report concludes with a collection of recommendations, which are grouped into four categories.
First is growing the supply of new talent: finding new ways to attract people into the industry, targeting a more diverse range of potential employees, retraining and up-skilling.
Next is supporting and improving the pathways for people to get into cyber security jobs: the report acknowledges that training has diversified over the years with concepts such as boot-camps and academies but recommends further innovation to continue the improvement, noting that regional differences in salary and job availability across the country should also be addressed.
Third is a recommendation to look at how universities and other Higher Education (HE) institutions can grow their output of cyber security graduates, and to consider how HE establishments can work at a local level with the organisations into which their graduates are likely to be fed.
The final category looks at diversity, with a recommendation around diversity in the traditional sense (that is, initiatives to attract women and members of minority groups into cyber) and another around diversity of circumstance – in the latter sense an example given is the potential to fund child-care in order for parents to enrol in cyber courses.