Expanding the cybersecurity pipeline through early exposure in undergraduate programs

The cybersecurity field has exponentially grown in recent history, with little to no general understanding of the requirements for professionals in the area. In 2018, it was estimated that 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs would be unfilled by 2021 globally. Many students associate the cybersecurity field with computer programming and hacking, unaware of the societal importance of this career path and its connection to many majors unrelated to computer science or computer engineering. Previous work in cybersecurity education has focused on tools that aid students in understanding specific concepts. None has taken the approach of clarifying the cybersecurity profession in the form of a short-duration seminar series. With this goal, we propose an introductory seminar and a follow-on optional seminar series. The implementation of such a strategy early in undergraduate education may allow students to connect the cybersecurity career paths to one of their societal benefits. This series is designed to provide the student with direct practical examples and thought-provoking questions for the applications of security in their daily life, emphasizing multidisciplinary aspects of the field. This paper describes our experience with this seminar series at a large public university in the Fall of 2021 and Spring of 2022. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by assessing its impact on students’ perceived awareness of cybersecurity careers and their interest in cybersecurity minors. Through this study, we observe that the seminar series resulted in an increase in student confidence regarding their understanding of the cybersecurity profession. The data also revealed an increased interest in the cybersecurity minors offered in our institution. Our implementation of this new seminar-based intervention has been limited to providing it as an extracurricular activity among many, therefore reaching only a small part of the first-year engineering students at the university. Still, the data indicates that such a seminar series is a viable instrument to make students aware of the opportunities in a cybersecurity career, its significant demand for professionals, and its potential for addressing societal problems. We make the seminar materials publicly available to facilitate the adoption of the proposed intervention at other institutions.