Understanding the Personality Characteristics of Cybersecurity Competition Participants to Improve the Effectiveness of
This paper reports on the results of a survey designed to study the psychological characteristics of a sample of cybersecurity competition participants from Cybersecurity Awareness Week (one of the largest cybersecurity competitions in the USA). By compar
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Abstract This paper reports on the results of a survey designed to study the psychological characteristics of a sample of cybersecurity competition participants from Cybersecurity Awareness Week (one of the largest cybersecurity competitions in the USA). By comparing the personality, vocational interests, culture, decision-making style and attachment style between participants who reported their intention to enter cybersecurity careers post-competition and those who did not, we evaluated the effectiveness of cybersecurity competitions as a recruitment tool. Overall, most cybersecurity competition participants tended to be high in openness, rational decision-making style, and investigative interests. Conversely, participants scored lower on neuroticism, intuitive decision-making style, and realistic interests. Individuals’ scores on investigative interests, openness to experience, rational decision-making, and self-efficacy were good predictors of their intention to enter cybersecurity careers post-competition. To increase the influx of people into cybersecurity careers, cybersecurity competitions can be designed to attract more people with these characteristics. Keywords Cybersecurity factors
Cybersecurity competitions Career choice Human
C. Wee (&) M. Bashir Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 501 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Bashir e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 D. Nicholson (ed.), Advances in Human Factors in Cybersecurity, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 501, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41932-9_10
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1 Introduction To address the shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals in the workforce, the United States government has directed funding to the sponsorship of cybersecurity competitions—high-school and collegiate contests of skills such as hacking and reverse engineering, designed to raise awareness about cybersecurity threats and foster interest in cybersecurity careers. Thus far, no known studies have attempted to validate the effectiveness of competitions as a recruitment tool. Beyond looking at the percentage of competition participants who enter cybersecurity careers in the future, we know little about the nature and types of people that are attracted to these competitions and require evidence that competitions are effective at funneling like-minded people into cybersecurity careers. We thus aimed to evaluate cybersecurity competition participants through a psychological lens to discover if there are certain people with particular personality traits that make them more receptive to the competition recruitment strategy. Cybersecurity competitions offer many benefits and opportunities to the parties involved. Schools host cybersecurity competitions because they can teach network security practices through live exercises and evaluate their own computer security curricula [1]. Technology and security companies oft
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