Cyber Expertise Diversity Survey
The Cyber Expertise Diversity Survey
The Cyber Expertise Diversity Survey is a project run by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS), led by Matt Spencer, RISCS Senior Fellow and Associate Professor at CIM.
Other CIM staff involved in putting the survey together and analysing the data include Carlos Cámara-Menoyo and Timothy Monteath.
The survey aims to inform cyber policy discussions by generating new insights into the value and distribution of cyber expertise.
The link to the survey will be live until the end of November 2024.
Exploring 'combs' of cyber expertise
Cyber security is becoming increasingly professionalised, with standardised categories of expertise, career paths and statuses. While there are clear benefits to professionalisation, it is important to ensure that policy is supported by evidence about possible side effects.
This survey aims to create an anonymous, open dataset, to support the analysis of how expertise is distributed across the cyber security profession, from the point of view of different industries, organisation sizes, and background of practitioners.
In the survey we ask participants to imagine their personal portfolios of expertise as a 'broken comb', where the teeth of different lengths represent their profile of expertise across corresponding areas. We find out about problem scenarios that participants face and the 'broken comb' of expertise that are required to address them. The survey is open to anyone who works in cyber security, in whatever capacity, industry, and career stage. The data we collect will be anonymous. More information is provided at the start of the survey (click the orange button to start!).
RISCS (the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security) is an interdisciplinary academic research institute funded by the National Cyber Security Centre.
Find out about the report
The report from the survey and an open access dataset will be available in early 2025. To find out about the report when it is ready:
Participant information leaflet
A downloadable pdf of the participant information leaflet is available here (the same information is provided in the first two pages of the survey itself):