SFIA8 Cybersecurity Skills Study

Abstract

In the context of digitalization of most areas of human activity, the problem of mass training of IT specialists becomes extremely important. In this connection, it seems an urgent task to create a digital platform that allows organizations to report their needs for specialists in real time to fill vacancies in the workplace, and the education system to respond to the relevant needs of employers and offer up-to-date training and retraining programs for in-demand personnel. An example of such a platform is the platform for the development of digital skills, which is being developed as part of the project activities of the laboratory of open information technologies of the faculty of the CMC of Moscow State University. The digital skills standard of the SFIA organization, presented in the form of a framework of the same name, was chosen as the methodological basis of the platform being developed. In September 2021, a new version of the framework was released - SFIA8, which, compared to the previous version of the standard, added two dozen new skills and revised the semantics of a number of skills of the previous version. Also, a characteristic feature of the new stage in the development of the SFIA approach was the development of clusters of roles based on the skills of SFIA (the so-called views of SFIA), corresponding to relevant technological areas, such as, for example, digital transformation, big data, software engineering, cybersecurity, etc. In the first part the article provides an analysis of the main innovations in the SFIA8 standard. The second part is devoted to the study of the semantics (knowledge-abilities) of SFIA8 skills, directly or indirectly related to cybersecurity. In the process of defining the composition of such skills, the skills identified in the SFIA8 Information and Cybersecurity view were primarily considered. The results of the study of the semantics of cybersecurity skills are available in the Appendix. The proposed description of SFIA8 cybersecurity skills in the context of knowledge and abilities is primarily aimed at methodologists and teachers of the education system who develop training programs for professionals in the field of cybersecurity.