Abstract

Continuing and deepening the work carried out in the Cybersecurity Report in Portugal - Society 2020, from the Cybersecurity Observatory, this study on higher education and vocational cybersecurity in Portugal aims to help outline the landscape regarding training for professionals or future professionals in the field, as well as for other professionals who intersect with cybersecurity themes, especially through specific disciplines in their educational journey. The study aims to achieve the following specific objectives:

1. Identify higher education and vocational courses in cybersecurity, including the number of students enrolled, graduates, faculty, and the evolution of master's dissertations and doctoral theses, with a temporal dimension to observe trends.
2. Characterize higher education and vocational courses in terms of content and outcomes, seeking, whenever possible, to compare them with general Information and Communication Technology education in Portugal and internationally.
3. Evaluate the needs of faculty, students, and the job market.

With an exploratory and reconnaissance focus on the territory that education and training in this area occupy in the Portuguese education system, the work starts from what can be known from published information (by schools, universities, repositories, national and international agencies), also integrating a temporal perspective to help read trends and project the future. Thus, in line with the National Cybersecurity Strategy 2019-2023, the study will enable the construction of a situated image of Education in Cybersecurity in Portugal, contributing to increasing awareness of the need to strengthen cybersecurity skills and knowledge in the education and training of teachers, students, and various actors throughout society.

This situated knowledge and recognition imply understanding the perspectives that key agents have regarding the training area and the profession in the current context in Portugal. Therefore, understanding the identified needs of faculty and students, as well as the perspectives of civil society and the market, is an essential complement. Given the limited time, the key interlocutors will be course directors, students who are members of collectives or student associations in the field, or year representatives, members of business associations, or Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) whose work includes cybersecurity issues.

Finally, a more extensive task requires examining the contents of curricular units and the results of cybersecurity courses, as well as the contents of curricular units in the field that are part of courses in other areas. This is a more extensive task, harder to contain, and for which timely access to necessary information is more difficult to ensure. For this reason, it is a task that, while it can be initiated as part of this study, will likely require a longer time frame to be carried out exhaustively.