As cybersecurity education continues to evolve, the need for curricula that effectively balance the capabilities of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools with the development of critical thinking and active learning skills has become increasingly urgent. This study addresses this challenge by proposing a curriculum for postgraduate cybersecurity education that focuses on developing transferable skills, particularly critical thinking and written communication. These skills are essential for cybersecurity professionals to excel in both their technical and communicationoriented responsibilities, meeting the growing demand of the cybersecurity industry in the age of AI. The proposed curriculum emphasizes the integration of constructivist learning principles and Bloom's taxonomy, two widely applied pedagogical models, to enhance learners' critical thinking and written communication skills. Designed for a penetration testing module, the curriculum follows a structured, step-by-step approach to build the necessary competences and empower aspiring cybersecurity professionals to meet the expectations of the cybersecurity industry. Through targeted activities, learners develop foundational knowledge while refining advanced written communication skills, equipping them to produce professional-level documentation, such as penetration testing reports. Generative AI is incorporated in the curriculum, providing opportunities for learners to experiment with AIgenerated content while fostering the cognitive skills needed to critically assess its accuracy, relevance, and alignment with professional standards. This study contributes to cybersecurity education by presenting a replicable curriculum model that equips learners with vital skills, preparing them to navigate the complexities of written communication responsibilities in cybersecurity roles and adapt to the evolving demands of the AI era.

We are navigating an era of ongoing technological transformations characterized by a growing need for developing digital skills, including cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy. The skills gap in cybersecurity has been acknowledged by the academic and business community at large, which faces an ongoing challenge in terms of finding and attaining talents. Even though different initiatives have been launched to upskill and reskill individuals, they are either ineffective in developing the required competencies or fail to motivate participants to learn and advance their competencies in relation to a cybersecurity job role. A key factor hindering these efforts is the adoption of a generic training approach rather than tailoring learning to the needs of individual learners. It is imperative to identify novel ways to motivate and engage learners, fostering a lifelong learning mindset that is essential for cybersecurity professional development and progression. This work aims to investigate how generative AI can be leveraged to empower professionals to take ownership of their learning by assisting them to create a personalized cybersecurity study plan. The objective is to inspire the design of innovative solutions focusing on accelerating skills development and contributing to increasing the supply of skilled cybersecurity professionals.

Cybersecurity policies play a fundamental role in fostering organizational cyber governance and cyber resilience. Cybersecurity awareness-raising and training policies specify upskilling requirements and explicitly address persistent threats such as social engineering attacks. While cybersecurity awareness-raising and training activities complement the objectives of security policies, challenges including stakeholder diversity, budget constraints, generic messaging and low user engagement hinder their effectiveness. For successful policy adoption it is crucial for the workforce to grasp the relevance of these policies within their work context, understand how social engineering attacks are deployed, and apply policy rules appropriately. However, existing awareness-raising and training policies often lack specificity, leading to gaps in employee engagement and behavioural change, especially regarding social engineering threats. To address these issues, the paper proposes a dedicated social engineering awareness-raising policy, guided by Merrill's Principles of Instructions. This work aims to merge policy and practice, offering tailored examples of social engineering attacks, explicitly connecting them to relevant cybersecurity policies and making the content more engaging and relevant to the workforce. This is envisioned as a cost-effective resource for organizations with a limited training budget, which can be utilized as a starting point to enhance employee awareness, engagement, and foster a stronger organizational cyber resilience culture.

Purpose The accelerated digital transformation and the growing emphasis on privacy, safety and security present ongoing challenges for cybersecurity experts. Alongside these challenges, the multidisciplinary, everchanging and complex nature of the cybersecurity domain has further challenged the acquisition and retention of cybersecurity talent. Empowering reskilling and upskilling in cybersecurity necessitates efficacious educational endeavours which promote self-confidence and foster a growth mindset. The purpose of this paper is to highlight that cultivating self-efficacy in cybersecurity education can help promote competency development and effectively address the prominent skills gaps. This notion applies equally to both aspiring individuals pursuing a career in cybersecurity and professionals in the field who may wish to better articulate the skills they already possess, the skills they lack and newly surfacing skills that need to be developed. Design/methodology/approach The study discusses the imminent need for adopting a “skills-first” approach in cybersecurity and explores innovative pedagogies and professional frameworks that can inform and frame such an approach. Subsequently, a critical analysis of the importance of self-efficacy towards motivating and supporting upskilling in cybersecurity is performed. A case study is presented, expanding the authors’ previous work on cybersecurity professional development, to demonstrate the mediating role that self-efficacy can play in developing core cybersecurity competencies. The case study presents the design of a new cybersecurity curriculum in the context of postgraduate, synchronous distance cybersecurity education, and it is utilised as a basis to discuss how the proposed curriculum cultivates self-efficacy attitudes. Findings A skills-first approach is becoming the new norm in contemporary workplaces. This work highlights the importance of actively nurturing self-efficacy attitudes through innovative cybersecurity curricula that can be tailored to the learners’ needs, instigating a drive for learning and, ultimately, helping learners effectively upskilling by portraying a self-directed learning path and a professional growth mindset in cybersecurity. Originality/value The authors present the importance of cultivating self-efficacy in higher and lifelong education to foster reskilling and upskilling in cybersecurity. An innovative cybersecurity curriculum was constructed and delivered with a group of learners demonstrating how self-efficacy can be leveraged through interactive, reflective and self-assessment educational activities that enhanced motivation and self-awareness, curiosity, attention to detail and resilience – key skills for a successful career in cybersecurity.

This paper presents an architecture for building multi player games that aim to teach coding skills and promote algorithmic thinking. The main requirements for the architecture are to enable quick and affordable development and deployment, support commodity client devices, and enable multiplayer, com-petitive gameplay. By demonstrating an evaluation case study, we show how the proposed architecture achieves these requirements. At its core, it realizes a distributed model extending the client-server paradigm, where multiple players can independently train, then compete in a multiplayer mode using a shared, cloud-based server. While the architecture is validated with a specific maze-themed case study game, we argue that the main principles of this approach can be reused to a wider range of multi player, educational games.