The European Cybersecurity Skills Framework (ECSF) was introduced by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) to identify the necessary competencies, knowledge, and skills required for European cybersecurity professionals. The ECSF condenses all cybersecurity-related positions into 12 role profiles, aiming to establish a mutual understanding of essential roles and support the creation of cybersecurity training programs. In order to address the shortage of cybersecurity experts, a multi-criteria selection method is developed to increase the availability, accessibility, and quality of cybersecurity courses and certifications. This Course Selection methodology ensures high-quality training materials that meet the current and future needs of the cybersecurity industry and benefit a wide range of participants. The methodology considers six criteria and provides a scoring system to rank the occupational profiles and select the most relevant profiles for the course design. Our final score formula identifies Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Cyber Incident Responder, Cyber Threat Intelligence Specialist, and Penetration Tester for the Course creation.

This article presents a new free web-based application, the Cybersecurity Job Ads Analyzer, which has been created to collect and analyse job adverts using a machine learning algorithm. This algorithm enables the detection of the skills required in advertised cybersecurity work positions. The application is both interactive and dynamic allowing for automated analyses and for the underlying database of job adverts to be easily updated. Through the Cybersecurity Job Ads Analyzer, it is possible to explore the skills required over time, and thereby enable academia and other training providers to better understand and address the needs of the industry. We will describe in detail the user interface and technical background of the application, as well as highlight the preliminary statistical results we have obtained from analysing the current database of job adverts.

Cybersecurity is a vital part of digital economies and digital governing but the discipline is suffering from a pronounced skills shortage. Nevertheless, the reasons for the inability of academia to produce enough graduates with the skills that reflect the needs of the cybersecurity industry are not well understood.

The EU NIS Directive introduces obligations related to the security of the network and information systems for Operators of Essential Services and for Digital Service Providers. Moreover, National Competent Authorities for cybersecurity are required to assess the compliance to these obligations. This paper describes a novel Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment Framework (CMAF) that is tailored to the NIS Directive requirements. CMAF can be used either as a self assessment tool from Operators of Essential Services and Digital Service Providers or as an audit tool from the National Competent Authorities for cybersecurity