CyberSkills Project: an Overview

CIT is the lead partner Cyber-Skills, a project that has been awarded €8.1 million under the Higher Education Authority (HEA) Human Capital Initiative (HCI) Pillar 3 scheme. The project aims to address the global shortage of cybersecurity professionals and Cyber-Skills has been designed to enhance Ireland’s competitiveness in this context. Ireland’s National Cybersecurity Strategy stresses the urgency of addressing this requirement, as well as the need to enhance the national supply of talent, to ensure that Ireland’s data centres (which house 30% of Europe’s data), businesses and critical infrastructure are protected. 

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The Cyber Skills project has several aims including:

  • Create Innovative, Enterprise focused and Research informed cybersecurity courses through meaningful collaborations with enterprise, research entities and national/international academic partnerships.

  • Empower Learner to design their own courses and take their own pathways with straightforward articulation and progression routes and clear mapping to NFQ levels. Cyber Skills will develop a typology of non-formal learning achievements and will develop a series of micro credentials which correspond with the associated learning requirements.

  • Facilitate new learning pathways using micro credentials and by capturing learning through e-Portfolios, providing flexibility in reward, indication, accommodation, and scaffolding of new forms of learning and learner pathways.

The Cyber-Skills project will be coordinated nationally across five higher education institutions, namely: CIT, IT Tralee, University of Limerick, Technological University Dublin and University College Dublin. The project also benefits from an international dimension with the involvement of Virginia’s Commonwealth Cyber Initiative which is based at the US University, Virginia Tech.

Dr Donna O’Shea, Chair of Cybersecurity at CIT, said: “Cyber-Skills will create innovative cybersecurity programmes, informed by enterprise needs and relevant research, through meaningful collaborations with national and international partners. It aims to address the major global opportunity that exists currently in the area of cybersecurity skills and training through the adoption of a large-scale national response.”

Luiz DaSilva, Executive Director of Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI), said, “The Cyber-Skills project is an ideal fit for the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, which brings together more than 300 researchers from 39 higher education institutions from across Virginia with the state-funded mission of research, innovation, and workforce development at the intersection of cybersecurity, autonomous systems, and data. Developing a highly skilled cybersecurity workforce is one of our key missions and this is an important international partnership between two countries with many cultural and economic ties. As part of the team, we will exchange best practices in cybersecurity education and workforce development, facilitate extended visits by students and faculty members on both sides of the Atlantic, and explore joint content creation and delivery.”

The Cyber Skills project is actively seeking suitably qualified applicants for a number of open positions:

  • Cyber Skills Project Manager
  • Cyber Skills Programme Manager
  • Cyber Skills Education and Public Engagement Manager
  • Lecturer (LCG) X 3
  • Senior Technical Officer

More information on these roles can be found on www.cit.ie/vacancies or by contacting [email protected].