Creating a Topic Map for representing Network Security Competencies

Abstract

Competencies represent the knowledge, skills and attitudes required for job roles. Organisations need to understand and grow competencies within their workforce in order to be more competitive and to maximise new market opportunities. The assessment of competencies can be conceptualised from two perspectives. The first is ‘Competency Frameworks’, which describe competencies from a high-level overview. The second perspective is ‘Competency-Based Learning’, which focuses on addressing competencies from a more detailed, task-oriented perspective. This research presents a tool that can map these two perspectives together. This mapping provides a more holistic approach to describing competencies, which is particularly important to network security occupational job roles. In this research, the Design Science paradigm was used as the methodology for creating and evaluating a topic map.