From Campus to Boot Camp — Lessons from Extramural Teaching in Cybersecurity

Work life is rapidly developing owing to digitalization and new work practices. As a consequence, intensive training is needed for working people to acquire new skills and knowledge. Such training might require larger efforts of weeks or months of full time work in order for professionals to get started on new roles at work. For this type of education, the boot camp format may be suitable. It is characterized by a focus on essentials in contents, scheduled work time, and social interaction and support amongst the course participants. This paper presents learning from boot camp training of conscript soldiers and it extends the experiences to training of working professionals. The novelty of the endeavor for the university is that the courses are given on a remote site by instructors without expert knowledge in the field; the university provides curated contents, formal examination and support to the instructors. This setup works well and has been in production for four years with minimal adjustments. It builds on good communication with the instructors, on teaching material structured for independent study, and on peer support among the students. We contrast the format with the popular massive open online courses and discuss how the boot camp format scales in terms of number of courses and course participants with respect to resources, primarily the time of the responsible teachers. The conclusion is that boot camp training should be considered for professional education and that it might not be more demanding for the teachers than any other course format.