Developing and evaluating cybersecurity competencies for students in computing programs

Abdullah Alammari; Osama Sohaib; Sayed Younes

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.827

Developing and evaluating cybersecurity competencies for students in computing programs

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2022 Jan 17:8:e827. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.827. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Abdullah Alammari¹, Osama Sohaib², Sayed Younes^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Education, Curriculums and Teaching Department, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia.
² Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
³ College of Education, Al Azhar University, Educational Technology Dept, Cairo, Egypt.

Abstract

Changes due to technological development in the workplace are putting pressure on academia to keep pace with the changing nature of work. Due to the growing need for cybersecurity professionals, universities improve their cybersecurity programs to develop qualified cybersecurity competencies. The purpose of this study is to validate the cybersecurity knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) competencies of cybersecurity degree programs using a fuzzy linguistic group decision-making method. This study shows that cybersecurity knowledge is essential, along with technical skills and human abilities for cybersecurity professionals.

Keywords: Computer education; Cybersecurity competency; Multi-criteria.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research at Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi (Grant Code: DSR-UQU-A2-19-EDU-1-02-00002). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.