Cyber Academy Strategic Needs Assessment for Jamaica and the Wider Caribbean

Summary

The Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) in Jamaica is informing the development of a Cyber School under the auspices of the Jamaican Defence Force. Under this project PGI provided a strategic training needs assessment for ONSA to inform the development of the Cyber School’s vision, goals, curriculum, course material and commercial model.

Details

Aim

The aim of the project was to support Jamaica’s ONSA, with the Caribbean Institute of Cyber Science (CICSci)’s strategic advice and insights to help develop a Cyber Academy that will facilitate the sustainable growth of a cadre of cyber skilled professionals in Jamaica and across the English-speaking Caribbean to enable Defence and public and private sector organisations develop digital resilience through the development of a regional cybersecurity workforce.

Context

The Government of Jamaica, with the Caribbean Institute of Cyber Science (CICSci), is establishing a new Cyber Academy  to build a professional and skilled cyber workforce and be a regional centre of excellence in cyber resilience. After consultation with the Organisation of American States, the ONSA partnered with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in engaging PGI with the aim of developing an analysis would inform the development of the Academy’s vision, goals, curriculum, course material and commercial model.

While the Cyber Academy will be based in Jamaica, it will provide regional training.  The project focused on identifying regional needs from Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago.

The sectors the needs assessment covered were: Public Service; Finance; Telecommunication; Education; Utilities – to include energy, gas and water; and Transport – to include aviation and hospitality.

Outcomes

The intended outcome to which this project contributes is the development of a Cyber Academy that will facilitate the sustainable growth of cyber skilled professionals in Jamaica and across the English-speaking Caribbean to enable Defence and public and private sector organisations to develop digital resilience through the development of a regional cybersecurity workforce.

Outputs

The first output of the project was a report on the Caribbean Regional Cybersecurity Training Needs Analysis (TNA).  This was published in March 2022. The report identifies eight strategic drivers that highlight the potential requirement of particular skillsets which are key to developing and building a strong cybersecurity workforce, as well as an enabling environment for Jamaica and the Caribbean region:

• Acceleration of digital transformation national and regional efforts
• Critical national infrastructure protection
• Enforcement and compliance with national cybersecurity legislative and regulatory agendas
• Capacity building in national security and the criminal justice system
• Strengthening incident response capabilities
• Adoption of security standards and controls
• Improving national and international cooperation
• Responding to the role of research and development

The TNA report lays out how CICSci can meet Jamaica’s strategic goals, as well as the needs of the broader region, and position itself as the driving force behind regional skills development while being financially sustainable, reducing dependence upon international training providers and ensuring that it owns the evolution of national cyber workforce capability and maintains the quality of training provision.

Further project outputs were reports on:

• Future workforce assessment
• Market assessment
• Gap assessment
• Cyber School design

Activities

The team began by identifying the requirements, sources of information and stakeholders.

PGIt then moved on to preparing its first report: a training needs analysis. Over a four-month period, PGI undertook a consultation with stakeholders from 11 countries via the inaugural Caribbean Cybersecurity Skills Symposium and conducted open-source intelligence and one-to-one stakeholder interviews.

The team  prepared a Future Workforce Assessment report. This was designed to provide an analysis of the eight strategic drivers identified earlier in the project and to extrapolate the technical cybersecurity job roles and additional cybersecurity skills that Jamaica and the Caribbean region will require to facilitate the delivery of capacity building targets, mitigate risks, and support the enforcement and compliance of related legislation and regulation. This included extrapolating requirements for: interventions to build national capacity maturity; establishment of cybersecurity workforce teams/units/functions ; identifying required technical cybersecurity job roles; and identifying additional cybersecurity skills required for the non-specialist workforce.

The report involved the identification and use of the following frameworks:

a) Strategic Drivers Report (from phase 2)

b) Oxford Cyber Maturity Model for Nations

c) The Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK)

d) Saudi Cybersecurity Workforce Framework (SCyWF)

e) Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework)

The next project activity was the preparation of a Market Assessment report informed by the following sources: publicly available data, statistics or reports; industry sources and benchmarks; industry media or corporate publications; cyber threat intelligence, incident coverage and associated analytics; and non-traditional media sources such as social media.

Subsequently PGI prepared a Gap Assessment report. The Gap Assessment was designed to combine the findings presented in the Future Workforce Assessment and the Market Assessment, to understand the gap between the anticipated skills requirements and current skills and training capability and capacity in Jamaica and the Caribbean region. The design included rating criteria ranging from ‘No Existing Offering’ to ‘Existing and Operating at Scale’.

The project concluded with a final Deep Dive Discussion where PGI presented the recommendations for the School Design based on the findings of the TNA took place in November 2021, before the submission of the final report in December 2021. PGI and the ONSA met in December 2021 to discuss and agree the final report.

Additional website links

https://jis.gov.jm/cabinets-approval-to-be-sought-for-cyber-academy/