NIST to Coordinate Cyber Ed Initiative
Program Aimed at Security Awareness, Education, Jobs
This initiative will call on the strengths of several U.S. government departments in order to address the education, training, and public awareness recommendations laid out by the president in the 2009 Cyberspace Policy Review. The initiative has four main components:
According to Locke, the initiative will address the education, training and public awareness goals outlined by President Obama last year in his Cyberspace Policy Review and consists of four main components:
- Promoting cybersecurity risk awareness for all citizens. This will require a comprehensive communications strategy focused on awareness of fraud, identity theft, cyber predators, piracy and cyber ethics. The Department of Homeland Security serve as lead agency.
- Ensuring our education system allows the United States to retain and expand its scientific, engineering and market leadership in cybersecurity technology. The Department of Education and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will assume the lead.
- Defining new strategies to ensure federal agencies can attract, recruit and retain skilled employees to accomplish cybersecurity missions. The Office of Personnel Management will serve as lead agency.
- Intensifying training and professional development of the existing federal cybersecurity workforce.
"Our task is to pull the pieces together into a coherent whole � to help ordinary citizens and Main Street businesses understand that improving cybersecurity is of paramount public and personal interest to everyone in America," Locke said in prepared remarks delivered to the Business Software Alliance, an industry lobbying group. "This is what we need to do to ensure that the promise of tomorrow's digital economy becomes reality."
