The Challenge

The diversity of talent needed for a vibrant and productive UK cyber ecosystem goes beyond those individuals with STEM knowledge and capability. Cyber, as with any job market, is composed of roles across technical, business, leadership and management. However, current approaches to the talent pipeline are focused on starting with technical talent.

This approach restricts the initial talent base to those currently, or could be enticed to be, interested in STEM subject that lead to Cyber careers. However, there is a wider, more diverse non-STEM talent base within young people who could bring their backgrounds and lived experiences to the cyber domain if an alternative approach is adopted that positions cyber in a different, non-STEM related way.

This project seeks to address the problem of increasing the diversity of talent interested and engaged with cyber security. Our hypothesis is that through the provision of a non-STEM focused cyber activities we are better able to engage a wider diversity of young people with the cyber industry and careers. As such the project will take a business focused approach to cyber engagement with young people, specifically targeting activities for KS3 and KS5.

Within this project we define diversity via the traditional measures associated with ethnicity, gender and socio-economic background. In addition to this we will add diversity of academic interest to explore whether the interventions proposed attract those with wider academic interests.

With the aim to increase the level of diversity and inclusivity, the outputs and impacts from this project target the primary challenges of:

• Increasing the routes into Cyber – by providing a Non-STEM set of cyber interventions
• Developing Cyber Education – by developing and understanding a broader range of cyber educational activities

The project also has clear additional benefits relating to Cyber Employability and the Cyber Ecosystem by developing new entrepreneurial skills and knowledge for a future workforce with long term impacts for the wider cyber security community. All these areas have been identified as CISSE problem book domains³ and there is a clear alignment with Pillar 1 of the National Cyber Strategy.

Why This Challenge is Important

Currently within schools 43% of students take STEM subjects at GCSE and 44% of students at A-Level take one STEM subject with the most popular STEM subject being Maths (11%) at A-Level. Computing – A benchmark of the potential cyber workforce remains stubbornly low at 2% of A-Level students. While there has been an increase in female students taking STEM subjects at A-Level there is still disparity when it comes to disciplines with female students focusing on Psychology (75%), Biology (65%) and Chemistry (55%) – not traditional, or obvious, routes into cyber. At GCSE while there is broadly a 50:50 split in core STEM subjects there is clear disparity in non-core sciences between boys and girls. 70% of students taking social science subjects were female with much lower rates for computer science (20%), Design and Tech (30%) and Engineering (18%) – all more traditional routes into cyber security pathways. (Statistics drawn from the Campaign for Science and Engineering A-Level and GCSE analysis 2022[1]).

With a reported annual cyber recruitment short fall of over 14k jobs per annum², coupled with the need for non-technical roles in cyber, it seems sensible to find mechanisms to tap into the wider variety of young people in schools that are taking non-STEM and non-core STEM subjects. This would also overcome the inherent limitations of a technology focused cyber engagement activities which limit the raw numbers relating to the talent that can enter the profession. Further, the technological education focus limits the potential range of solutions to the cyber challenge due to a lack of diversity in critical thought which comes from a work force with diverse disciplinary interests and cultural heritage.

References

[1] https://www.sciencecampaign.org.uk/analysis-and-publications/detail/a-level-and-gcse-results-analysis-2022/