Building Cyber Defenders of the Future: Curriculum Design for Emerging Roles

Abstract

Creating and maintaining curriculum for emerging cybersecurity work roles is a significant challenge for organizations. Training is expensive, and quality curriculum requires careful curation and sustained effort. Such curriculum typically combines cognitive learning with a considerable amount of applied, hands-on practice. Data is currency, both for emerging cybersecurity work roles and for instrumenting the curriculum itself. We are developing courses for emerging work roles on Cyber Protection Teams (CPTs), specifically for the positions of Analytic Support Officer (ASO) and Data Engineer (DE). Analytic Support Officers learn to ingest cyber threat intelligence, analyze cybersecurity datasets, map enemy courses of action, develop analytics, and provide expert assessments in support of operational decision-making. Data Engineers learn to explore cybersecurity datasets, implement effective data models, collect information from key data sources, transform data for usability, and store data for future analysis. We take a learning engineering approach that incorporates instrumentation, data collection, and behavioral analysis to support curriculum development while maximizing the use of open-source tools and open standards. The effort also includes integrating hands-on virtual environments, competency frameworks, and open standards such as Experience API (xAPI) and Computer Managed Instruction (cmi5) to track training effectiveness and ensure alignment with training goals. This paper discusses the technical and organizational challenges of developing cognitive and hands-on content, aligning instruction with learner motivations and competency frameworks, and applying learning engineering methods and open standards to support modern cyber workforce development.