The Hague Security Delta (HSD), Europe’s leading security cluster, presents its ‘Human Capital Actieagenda Cyber Security’ to tackle the discrepancies on the Cyber Security labour market. Increasingly organisations are looking for cyber security professionals, but they are in short supply. A modest estimate is an acute shortage of 230-600 professionals in The Netherlands with a demand that is growing over 10% per year. There is also a qualitative mismatch between demand and supply. Overall the access to talent in cyber security needs to improve. The agenda aims to increase the pool of cyber security talent via two tracks: improve the connection between education and labour market, and attract & develop more talent.
The agenda is branded as an ‘agenda for action’ to emphasize the need for action that has to be taken regarding the lack of skilled professionals. This cannot be solved with a simple flip of the switch or by any organisation alone. It requires coordinated efforts and innovative solutions of public and private partners combined. The agenda plans to realise the following goals:
Focussed growth in educational offerings and available teachers;
Strengthened connection between the educational programmes and employer needs;
Increased number of students that choose for a career in cyber security;
Develop competences of cyber security professionals;
Stimulate retraining programmes to grow the talent pool.
The HSD Human Capital Programme Team addresses urgent human capital issues that organisations working in the field of safety and security are dealing with. Many partners of HSD contributed to the development of the agenda, amongst others: Cyber Security Academy, dcypher, ECP/Dutch Digital Delta, Fortress, Fox-IT, City of Den Haag, De Haagse Hogeschool, KPN, ROC Mondriaan, Security Academy, Security & Continuity Institute (SECO) and Delft University of Technology. Even more partners will be involved in it’s realisation.
From 2016 untill 2018 the contributing organisations executed two programme tracks. Track 1: focussed on improving the connection between education and labour market. Track 2: focussed on attracting and developing talent. Several successes have been achieved, some of them as output of the HSD Office, most of them as results of partners with support from HSD Office and the HCA Cyber Security.
You can download the Human Capital Actieagenda Cyber Security 2016-2018 here (in Dutch only).