The Cyber Skills Gap

The cybersecurity field is growing fast and directly affected by Industry 4.0. Across all sectors, government, education, and industry, partnerships are developing to address the skills gap. It has recently been calculated that 48% of the businesses have a skills gap (Pedley et al., 2020), and actually, two-thirds of those stakeholders face issues with cyber skills, whether that is low-level or advanced skills. Over the years, there has been a plethora of qualifications and certifications developed and introduced in the discipline of Computer Science but also in an interdisciplinary approach in order to bridge those gaps. The growing demand across countries and governments on how to close the skills gap and the Digital Revolution of the continuous economic restructure in Europe, the US, and all over the world develop new areas and skills needed and at the same time create skills shortage. The Skills Mismatch Index that was put together to indicate and forecast the skills gap by 2020 noted that in the Eurozone alone we experience 900,000 shortage of professionals in STEM (Francis and Ginsberg, 2016). The recent research published in 2019 evidenced that these figures are set to get worse and revealed that there could be 7 million under-skilled or their job requirements (Industrial Strategy Council, 2019).