The National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) is a nationally coordinated effort focused on cybersecurity awareness, education, training, and professional development. Two Executive Branch initiatives, in 2008 and 2010, founded the NICE. It seeks to encourage and build cybersecurity awareness and competence across the nation and to develop an agile, highly skilled workforce capable of responding to a dynamic and rapidly developing array
of cyber threats.
Today, there is little consistency in how cybersecurity work is defined or described throughout the Federal Government and the nation. The absence of a common language to discuss and understand the work and skill requirements of cybersecurity professionals hinders our nation’s ability to baseline capabilities, identify skill gaps, develop cybersecurity talent in the current workforce, and prepare the pipeline of future talent. Consequently, establishing and using a common lexicon and taxonomy for cybersecurity work and workers is not merely desirable, but vital to the nation’s cybersecurity.
To this end, this document, The NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework, puts forth a working taxonomy and common lexicon that can be overlaid onto any organization’s existing occupational structure. It has been developed largely with input from the Federal Government, but that is not sufficient; we need to ensure that this framework can be adopted and used across the nation in both the public and private sectors. Moreover, the framework should address emerging work requirements to help ensure the nation has the skills to meet them. Therefore, we seek to refine this framework with input from every sector of our nation’s cybersecurity stakeholders, including academia, professional, and non-profit organizations, and private industry. Much as other professions such as medicine and law, have codified their specialties, it is now time to forge a common set of definitions for the cybersecurity workforce.
This framework organizes cybersecurity into seven high-level categories, each comprising several specialty areas. This organizing structure is based on extensive job analyses and groups together work and workers that share common major functions, regardless of actual job titles or other occupational terms. As the job analysis information regarding these specialty areas is extensive, only the framework is published here. Additional details regarding each specialty area, as well as more information about the framework in general, is available online (please see the end of this booklet). Therefore, the goal of this document is simply to introduce you to The NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework and to seek your help to ensure that it
