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Assessing the Impact of a National Cybersecurity Competition on Students' Career Interests

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2-21-2018

Abstract

It is well documented that there is a sizable shortage of workers in cybersecurity and related careers. Exacerbating this problem are severe imbalances with respect to gender and other underrepresented categories, with one recent study finding only 11% of cybersecurity professionals are women. One approach to addressing these shortages is to attempt to increase interest in cybersecurity careers through extracurricular cybersecurity competitions. CyberPatriot is the largest cybersecurity competition for middle and high school students in North America, with over 14,000 young people participating during the 2016-2017 school year. This paper assesses the impact of this competition on participants' interest in cybersecurity careers. Survey data previously collected by the competition organizers is analyzed with rigorous statistical methods. Results show that participants' interest in cybersecurity increased meaningfully in several dimensions relevant to career selection. Further analysis also finds that despite lower initial interest in cybersecurity careers among female participants, this interest increased by an even greater amount than it did for male participants.

Comments

The "Link to Full Text" on this page opens the full conference paper hosted at ACM.

Copyright © 2018 Public Domain. This paper is authored by an employee(s) of the United States Government and is in the public domain. Non-exclusive copying or redistribution is allowed, provided that the article citation is given and the authors and agency are clearly identified as its source.

Co-author M. Dunn was completing an AFIT graduate program at the time of this conference. (AFIT-ENG-MS-18-M-021, March 2018)

Source Publication

Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - SIGCSE '18

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