Building the Nation’s Cyber Security Workforce

Abstract

This article presents a view of the necessary size and composition of the US national cyber security workforce, and considers some of the contributions that the government-designated Centers of Academic Excellence (CAE) might make to it. Over the last dozen years about 200 million taxpayer dollars have gone into funding many of these CAEs, with millions explicitly targeted to help them build capacity. The most visible intended output has been in the form of around 125 Scholarship for Service (SFS) students per year going mostly into the workforce of the federal government. Surely the output capacity of these 181 colleges and universities is greater than that, and should be helping to protect the rest of US citizens and taxpayers. We take a need-based look at what the nation’s workforce should look like, and then consider some possibilities of what the CAE schools could be doing to help to close the gaps between that perceived need and the supply and demand.